The Linux Foundation,
the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open
source, today is announcing FD.io ("Fido"), a Linux Foundation project.
FD.io is an open source project to provide an IO services framework for
the next wave of network and storage software. The project is also
announcing the availability of its initial software and formation of a
validation testing lab.
Early support for FD.io comes from
founding members 6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson,
Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel Corporation, Mesosphere, Metaswitch
Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat.
Architected as
a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user
space IO services framework that supports rapid development of
high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services. The
design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM,
container) agnostic.
"The adoption of open source software has
transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation
and increasing user adoption," said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The
Linux Foundation. "The FD.io project addresses a critical area needed
for flexible and scalable IO services to meet the growing demands of
today's cloud computing environments."
Software Features
Initial
code contributions for FD.io include Vector Packet Processing (VPP),
technology being donated by one of the project's founding members,
Cisco. The initial release of FD.io is fully functional and available
for download, providing an out-of-the-box vSwitch/vRouter utilizing the
Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for high-performance,
hardware-independent I/O. The initial release will also include a full
build, tooling, debug, and development environment and an OpenDaylight
management agent. FD.io will also include a Honeycomb agent to expose
netconf/yang models of data plane functionality to simplify integration
with OpenDaylight and other SDN technologies.
Future
contributions from the open source community and FD.io members are
expected to extend FD.io capabilities in areas such as firewall, load
balancing, LISP, host stack, IDS, hardware accelerator integration,
additional SDN protocol support via additional management agents, and
other critical IO services for network and storage traffic.
VPP is
production code currently running in products available on the market
today. VPP runs in user space on multiple architectures, including x86,
ARM, and Power, and is deployed on various platforms including servers
and embedded devices. VPP is two orders of magnitude faster than
currently available open source options, reaffirming one of the core
principles of FD.io, a focus on performance. Prior to the formation of
FD.io, an independent test lab conducted a performance evaluation on
VPP. The full report is available here.
Validation Testing Lab
FD.io
also announces the formation of its Continuous Performance Lab (CPL).
The CPL provides an open source, fully automated testing infrastructure
framework for continuous verification of code functionality and
performance. Code breakage and performance degradation is flagged before
patch review, conserving project resources and increasing code quality.
The CPL allows FD.io to guarantee performance, scalability, and
stability for each release. The physical hardware needed to run the
performance testing will be hosted at FD.io, with donations of a diverse
set of hardware from many vendors.
Just as open source efforts
such as the OpenDaylight Project (ODL), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) have formed to advance
orchestration and network controller capabilities, FD.io will foster
similar innovation in the critical, and, as yet, unaddressed area of IO
services. FD.io will help advance the state of the art of network and
storage infrastructure and will quickly become a "must have" technology
in next-gen service provider and enterprise data center strategies as
its benefits to areas like SDN and NFV are realized.
The FD.io
Project is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Founded in 2000,
The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale
any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not
achievable by any one company. More information can be found at http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/.
For more information or to learn how to participate in the FD.io Project, please visit: https://fd.io.