DPDK Summit 2026

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) requires seamless integration into modern packet frameworks. This work introduces post-quantum cryptography (PQC) support in the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) through the OpenSSL Poll Mode Driver (PMD), providing developers with a practical entry point to experiment with PQC primitives using the familiar cryptodev API. The OpenSSL PMD implementation serves as a reference design, demonstrating how PQC algorithms such as key encapsulation and digital signatures can be exposed consistently to applications with minimal changes. For developers, this enables immediate validation, benchmarking, and integration of PQC workloads in software, while establishing a clear API model for future extensions. The long-term vision is for hardware crypto accelerators—including Octeon CNXK and VirtIO crypto drivers—to adopt this reference approach, ensuring interoperability and contributing back to the community. By aligning software and hardware PMDs around a unified PQC API, DPDK fosters a collaborative ecosystem where developers, vendors, and operators can build scalable, quantum resilient applications such as VPNs, TLS termination, IPsec gateways, and 5G cores.

DPDK is used as the packet-ingest layer for a traffic monitoring system feeding an internal DPI engine.
Today, throughput is maximized by tuning for a specific server/NIC/OS combination, but this reduces portability and increases operational effort.

This lightning talk discusses the throughput impact observed when moving toward a more “generic” deployment.
Results are presented for: (1) optimized (“native”) vs portable (“generic”) builds, (2) CPU isolation, (3) hugepage configuration and (4) PMD/driver configuration.

As network speeds increase, relying on hardware offloading via rte_flow becomes essential. However, the implementation of these APIs varies significantly across vendors. This talk shares findings from an ongoing exploration of NIC performance (NVIDIA, Intel or DYNANIC), with a primary focus on the capabilities and limitations of hardware-offloaded packet filtering using the DPDK rte_flow API. While standard throughput metrics are important, this session moves beyond basic performance to explore the behavior of NICs under stress and in ambiguous scenarios that are often overlooked in standard datasheets.

eBPF support was added to DPDK in 2018, enabling users to execute custom byte-code to extend application functionality without rebuilding or restarting. Our Data-Plane team aims to make eBPF a first-class citizen in HC data-plane appliances. However, safe usage requires ensuring custom programs won't crash the application. The current DPDK eBPF verifier lacks essential features and isn't as robust as the Linux kernel version. This presentation covers two aspects:
- eBPF Usage in Data-Plane Appliances: Current and planned uses, missing DPDK eBPF functionality, and requirements for wider community adoption.
- Verifying the Verifier: We applied bounded model checking and deductive verification to verify the BPF validator's correctness. We uncovered multiple previously unknown bugs across distinct classes. For each bug, we produced counterexamples, verified fixes, and machine-checked proofs. Using an AI assistant, we formally verified the validator in days. We'll share practical lessons for applying AI-assisted formal verification to DPDK subsystems.

In the field of high-performance networking, traditional packet capture tools like tcpdump are facing a massive blind spot in observability. tcpdump relies heavily on the kernel protocol stack, whereas modern high-performance applications widely adopt DPDK technology. In DPDK, packets flow directly between userspace drivers and applications via mbuf, completely bypassing the kernel.

To address these pain points, we have introduced an internal open-source network observability tool — netcap.

Netcap not only inherits the ability to trace kernel skbs but also achieves breakthrough support for DPDK mbufs:
- Deep Userspace Introspection: It can delve directly into userspace memory, non-intrusively capturing and parsing mbuf data flowing through critical DPDK processing functions.
- Zero Learning Curve: It perfectly supports tcpdump filter syntax (BPF filters), allowing developers to precisely capture the mbuf traffic they care about, just like using tcpdump.

The emergence of netcap effectively fills the gap in "mbuf observability" within high-performance network development, making black-box debugging of DPDK applications a thing of the past.

Events (jobs) in Eventdev are non-preemptive, and thus must be relatively short run time.

One way to deal with this issue is to split large jobs into multiple events.

For legacy code, originally design for POSIX threads, such an exercise may be costly. Also, for certain domains, being able to retain the stack between invocations (events) may results in a simpler program.

This talk briefly introduce this topic and discuss an Ericsson prototype coroutine library running on top of Eventdev, allowing for a code written for a thread-like, cooperative multi-tasking programming model to coexist with native event-driven programs running on the same DPDK lcores, making the coroutine library in combination the event device a task/thread scheduler.

Currently, the standard development workflow for DPDK goes something like this: A developer wants to add a new feature or resolve a bug in DPDK, so they write a patch, run the DPDK unit tests against it, and then if those are passing, send it off to the mailing list, where it will get picked up by CI labs that run end to end testing on real hardware using the DPDK Test Suite. Although this solution works fairly well, DPDK developers may also gain some valuable speed and confidence by directly integrating the DPDK Test Suite into their local development workflow. So, I will “demo” the following sequence. First apply a patch to DPDK which either resolves or breaks some DPDK functionality. Then, pass this new DPDK source into the DPDK Test Suite, executing a testcase/testcases on a minimal DTS setup. Then, overview the results produced by DTS, and highlight how the patch applied in step 1 resolved/broke functionality tracked by the testcase/testcases being run. Specifically, I will demonstrate this workflow through the new Flow Offload Testsuite that is arriving to DPDK in DPDK version 26.03.