DPDK Summit 2026

DPDK transformed wired networking by giving host software direct control over packet processing. This talk makes the case that the same approach should be applied to 802.11 wireless.

Wi-Fi’s real behavior—contention, TXOP scheduling, A-MPDU aggregation, rate adaptation, and retries—is hidden below the 802.3 interface inside firmware and hardware state machines. This prevents per-packet observability and programmable control.

We propose a Wi-Fi Poll Mode Driver model that operates natively on 802.11 frames, exposing aggregation and retry behavior as first-class metadata and accepting explicit transmission parameters (MCS/NSS/BW, TXOP limits, retry policy). With this interface, a DPDK application can coordinate microsecond-scale MAC scheduling with millisecond-scale ECN/AQM control.

We outline the required PMD interface, metadata surface, and driver hooks needed to bring software-defined control to wireless networking.

Overview of GFNI based Toeplitz hash implementation

Physical AI systems demand ultra‑low‑latency transport of rich sensor data from the edge to centralized AI compute. This talk showcases a DPDK‑based sensor bridge using NXP i.MX processors as NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge endpoints, delivering deterministic, zero‑copy perception pipelines. It highlights how DPDK unlocks a new class of real‑time workloads for robotics, industrial vision, and Physical AI.
 

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.

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.

Note: I have not reviewed the two-hour "Inclusive Speaker Orientation" training. If this is mandatory, please ignore this submission.

The Birds of a Feather session is an opportunity for all attendees to propose topics for open discussion. Please bring your ideas to the session, and we will select a few for informal, interactive conversations.