The Linux Foundation Forms Open Source Effort to Advance IO Services

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - February 11, 2016) -  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.