The DPDK project announced the availability of its 18.05 software release, which is its fifth release since joining the Linux Foundation last year.  

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project consists of libraries that were designed to speed up packet processing workloads across various architectures. By enabling fast packet processing, DPDK makes it possible for service providers, vendors and organizations to move performance-sensitive applications to the cloud in order to create high-performing edge devices.  

"The number of companies involved in this has continued to grow and we're up to 21 members today," said DPDK Chair Jim St. Leger in an interview with FierceTelecom. "If you look at the 18.05 release, which is our largest release to date, it has over 1,700 patches, which from our world is pretty huge. I think that's a pretty big number for any open source project."  

"We have over 25 different companies with 160 people from those companies contributing to it," he added. "It's really built up to become the de facto open source networking project in the industry."  

The 18.05 release includes additional cryptography support, such as APIs, through DPDK's Cryptodev library as well as a parallel path around compression support.  

"With all of the traffic moving across the network, the more you can compress it the more efficiently you can move that traffic," he said. "So we created something called 'Compressdev' that's a compression API. Very similar to what we did with Cryptodev, we started off with software support and in the next release, which is 18.08, we'll add support for hardware compression as well."  

In addition to adding support for new devices, 18.05 also includes the start of a developer API to support field-programmable gate array (FPGA).