Stratum 22.03 release is now available!

[Brian O'Connor]

Dear Stratum Community,

We are pleased to announce the Stratum 2022-03-18 release (or 22.03 for short). 

This release is contains a number of new features and bug fixes, including:

• Stratum now uses P4Runtime canonical byte strings by default.
• For stratum_bfrt targets, the old behavior can be enabled with the enable_bfrt_legacy_bytestring_responses flag.
• P4Runtime metadata translation is now experimentally supported for stratum_bfrt and is enabled with the experimental_enable_p4runtime_translation flag.
• Support for Intel P4Studio 9.5.2, 9.7.1, and 9.8.0 (9.3.x is no longer supported)
• Starting with 9.7.0, only stratum_bfrt is supported, and stratum_bf will be removed for all versions in the next release.

The Stratum community has also introduced a Core Contributors program, which is a set of people who manage Github issues, approve pull requests, and otherwise help maintain the project. Details for how to become a core contributor can be found in CONTRIBUTION.md and a list of current core contributors is in the wiki.

The following hardware targets have been certified by ONF's Continuous Certification Program for the Stratum v22.03 release and will continue to be re-verified on a daily basis against the most recent version of the software. Details about these products can be viewed in the ONF Marketplace:
Pre-built Docker images and Debian packages, along with a more extensive change list, can be accessed on the Stratum 2022-03-18 release page.

• APS Networks BF2556X-1T
• APS Networks BF6064X-T
• Edgecore AS7712-32X
• Edgecore Wedge100BF-32X

On behalf of the Stratum TST,

Brian O’Connor (Lead, ONF)
Alireza Ghaffarkhah (Google)
Craig Stevens (Dell/EMC)
Max Pudelko (ONF)
Yi Tseng (ONF)