June 10, 2024
The Vector Packet Processor (VPP) is a high-performance framework for forwarding and processing packets in userspace. VPP is built as a core on top of DPDK, but it offers several opportunities for other network interfaces and has a robust plugin model enabling rich applications, including network services and application protocols such as web servers.
VPP is written as a high-performance framework, and it takes that claim to heart. The core of the project is enabled by engineers from Cisco, with support for the organization from the Linux Foundation. With this team behind the project, they can offer encompassing continuous integration and testing and a performance regression process called CSIT, which continually tests VPP on a selection of hardware to discover and address detrimental changes.
This article describes the open sourcing and upstreaming process of the VPP port to the VPP Project; a technical discussion of the work required to port VPP to FreeBSD is available in this article’s twin.