DASH Workgroup Community Update 12/10/2025 - Last one for 2025!

[Kristina Moore]

Hello DASH Open Source Community – Happy New Year and Thank You All for the participation in 2025 !  I’m sending the end of year SONiC-DASH notes here and will reformat for the 2026. 

Although we typically do not hold DASH calls on the 1^st Wednesday of each month, I’ll be there tomorrow to engage for the new year. 

In summary, last session we:

• Focused on advancing SONIC telemetry counter standardization, including merging vendor contributions (AMD, NVIDIA, others).
• Reviewed ~30 PRs completed since the prior meeting, including graceful shutdown improvements, changes to DPU agent subscriptions, HA fixes, and DSCP‑to‑queue mapping stability work.
• Confirmed integration work for github.com/sonic-net/sonic Issue 2139 https://github.com/sonic-net/DASH/issues/689 (telemetry counter consolidation), including next steps for vendor validation and markdown unification.
• NAT64 / IPv6 support discussions to be continued; deep‑dives planned for January (@Michal Zygmunt)
• Announced acceptance of SmartSwitch/flow‑offload paper to NSDI 2026 (@Zhixiong Niu)

For brevity’s sake this week, I’ll only list the Completed items in our table further below (as our work items list is quite large).

I’m still looking to leverage the Linux Foundation lists more to manage communications.  If you could please take the time to enter your info here, I can initiate deletion of the sonic-dash@googlegroups list we used when we began the project. 

For Complete Details, please see the “Full DASH Community Notes” near the end of this communication. 

Follow-ups: 

• Continue to integrate counter data into Issue 2139
• Follow up on unmerged SONIC management tests related to APPLDB subscription changes
• Merge Python tooling contributed by Farhan & Farhat (@Prince Sunny)

 

In Summary (full list below), since the last Community call we have:

32 PRs Completed (+20)

11 in To Do (+/- 0 )

6 in Draft (- 3)

41 in Progress (-2)

13 Awaiting Review (-2)

 

Just a reminder that we would encourage/invite Community members to present to the Community (test runs or progress, new scenarios, etc…), just ‘r’ to let me know, or generate a PR in the repo.

The DASH channel link is here to subscribe / access WG content (and click the bell to receive notifications). 

 Thank you for your time/contributions – see you on 1/7/2026

 

Meeting Title:  SONiC-DASH-Workgroup Community Meeting #166

Attendees (15):

DASH Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash

Linux Foundation list: https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash

 

Amita Gavirneni - Nvidia	Michael Aronovici - Cisco	Sasha (Oleksandr) Ivantsiv - Nvidia
Don Ewald - Cisco	Michal Zygmunt - MSFT	Selvarajan, Arunachalam - AMD
Gagan Punathil Ellath - Nvidia	Mircea Dan Gheorghe - Keysight	Swaminathan Balasubramanian - Keysight
Kristina Moore - MSFT	Oleksandr Ivantsiv - Nvidia	Veerappan, Senthilnathan - AMD
Marian Pritsak - Nvidia	Ramesh Raghupathy - Cisco	Vivek Reddy Karri - Nvidia

   

 

 

Full DASH Community Notes 😊

•  Telemetry Counter Standardization and Contributions: Kristina led a discussion with Michal, Arun (AMD), and others on the ongoing effort to standardize telemetry counters, including recent contributions from AMD and coordination with vendors like NVIDIA, with plans to consolidate and document all counters in a shared markdown table.

• Recap of Counter Standardization Efforts: Recapped previous discussions about the need to standardize telemetry counters, referencing the creation of GitHub Issue2139 to track this work and the call for contributions from the community, including outreach via LinkedIn.
• Documenting and Merging Contributions: Kristina compiled counters from Michal's document, the SAI experimental counters, and a document by Riff, and integrating Arun (AMD)'s contributions from AMD, with Arun (AMD) confirming he marked mapped and duplicate counters and added comments for clarification.
• Table Structure and Description Enhancement: The group discussed the structure of the markdown table, which includes counter names, SAI names, descriptions, and vendor support columns, and notes with Michal suggesting the addition of per-vendor columns. 
• Vendor Coordination and Next Steps: reached out to the NVIDIA team for their input on supported counters, with Marian noting the need for internal review and Kristina offering to facilitate further discussions or calls as needed.

• Recent and Ongoing Pull Requests and Feature Updates: reviewed approximately 30 completed items since the last meeting, highlighting key PRs such as graceful shutdown support, database subscription changes, and test improvements.

• Graceful Shutdown Support Implementation: Ramesh explained the intent and technical implementation of graceful shutdown support, detailing the need to ensure all DPU operations are gracefully completed before shutdown, the creation of new daemons for monitoring, and the handling of race conditions and state transitions.
• Database Subscription Model Change: discussed a completed PR that changed the database the DPU orchagent listens to, shifting the subscription model to a new database, and Gagan later raised a related question about aligning test cases with this change.
• Test and Feature Enhancements: highlighted additional completed work, such as adding timers for HA scenarios, upgrading SONiC MGMT, adding loopback checks for HA, and stabilizing DSCP to queue mapping tests, with Sasha confirming NVIDIA's contribution to the latter.
• New Contributors and Community Engagement: noted the involvement of new contributors, including a student from the University of Chicago, and the closure of duplicate PRs, emphasizing the growing community participation in the project.

• Open Issues, Pending Merges, and Action Items: Gagan raised concerns about pending merges for SONiC MGMT test cases related to recent database changes.  Marian mentioned ongoing exploration of other options for a recent header file addition.

• Pending Merge for SONiC MGMT Test: Gagan pointed out that while the DPU orchagent changes have been merged, the corresponding SONiC MGMT test cases have not yet been updated or merged, the SONiC team will need to follow up on the draft PR to ensure alignment.  Gagan clarified that the changes are complete and only require merging.
• Other Open Items and Next Steps: mentioned the need to review and update several new and blank items, integrate counter information into the main tracking issue, and coordinate with Prince for merging Python integration work from Farhan and Farhat.

• NAT64 and IPv6 Feature Planning: Michal discussed the creation of an Issue for upcoming NAT64 and IPv6 support, with plans for further technical talks and requirements gathering in January.

• NAT64 and IPv6 Issue Creation: confirmed the creation of an Issue to track NAT64 and IPv6 support, referencing Michal's previous request and summarizing the need for translation using configurable prefix-based routing and map pools.
• Future Technical Discussions: Michal agreed to provide a more detailed technical overview and requirements discussion for NAT64 in a future meeting, tentatively planned for January.

• Recognition of Community Achievements: Kristina announced that a paper related to Smart Switch and flow offload accepted at NSDI 26, crediting a Microsoft Research collaborator for initiating the effort.
  
  

Follow-up tasks:

• Linux Foundation Mailing List Migration: Deprecate the SONiC...@googlegroups.com mailing list after confirming all relevant members have joined the Linux Foundation list. (Kristina)
• Counter Standardization Contributions: Merge AMD’s contributed counters into the main counters list and enhance the list with any additional counters and descriptions as discussed. (Complete - Kristina, Arun (AMD))
• Vendor Counter Support Mapping: Request information from Nvidia regarding which counters they already support and their corresponding counter names, and update the counters markdown accordingly. (Kristina, Marian)
• SONiC MGMT Test PR Merge: Follow up to ensure the SONiC MGMT test PR (20995) is merged to align with the already merged orch agent changes. (Complete)
• Python Integration Merge: Work with Prince to get a merge on Farhan and Farhat's integrated Python code. (Kristina)

 

Sticky for Links/Reference:
DASH Groups to join to receive Invites, Meeting Notes, and Comms	DASH: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash     DASH-Test-Workgroup Group: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash-test-workgroup   Linux Foundation list: https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash	If anyone knows potentially interested people who would like info re: our community, please have them joins these groups for receive Comms, etc…
Recordings	Teams: SONiC-DASH Workgroup Community Meeting-20251210_090605-Meeting Recording.mp4 DASH Community https://youtu.be/e3xshCWORCI	12/10/2025 DASH Community Call; please request access via the link if you are not able to view/listen
Azure DASH GitHub Repo:	https://github.com/sonic-net/DASH
Test/Docs folder:	https://github.com/sonic-net/DASH/blob/main/test/docs/dash-test-workflow-saithrift.md	Ideal test workflow is here, converted to .md
SAI Thrift	SAI Thrift PR	Client server needed for testing
P4	https://opennetworking.org/p4/ and https://p4.org/working-groups/	Open source, domain-specific programming language for network devices, specifying packet processing for data plane devices (switches, routers, NICs, filters, etc.)
PINS	https://opennetworking.org/pins/
PNA consortium spec	https://p4.org/p4-spec/docs/PNA-v0.5.0.html	An architecture describing the structure and common capabilities of network interface controller (NIC) devices which process packets transiting one or more interfaces and a host system. Describes the structure and capabilities of the pipeline, and a user program, which specifies the functionality of the programmable blocks within that pipeline. For more information, see the P4 Language Consortium specifications
IPDK	Infrastructure Programmer Development Kit (ipdk.io) and https://github.com/ipdk-io/ipdk-io.github.io	IPDK is an open source, vendor agnostic framework of drivers and APIs for infrastructure offload and management which runs on a CPU, IPU, DPU or switch. IPDK runs in Linux and uses a set of well-established tools such as DPDK and P4 to enable network virtualization.
bmv2	https://github.com/p4lang/behavioral-model	The second version of the reference P4 software switch, nicknamed bmv2 (for behavioral model version 2). The software switch is written in C++11. It takes as input a JSON file generated from your P4 program by a P4 compiler and interprets it to implement the packet-processing behavior specified by that P4 program
DPDK	https://www.dpdk.org/	DPDK is the Data Plane Development Kit which consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures.
Linux Foundation SmartSwitch	https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/sonic-smartswitch/calendar

  

Thank you again for your participation…

Kristina Moore MBA, M.S., CISSP - Azure Core Principal PM / DASH & SmartSwitch
Office: 425-722-7720     Mobile: 425-876-2040     Email: kri...@microsoft.com
DASH Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash    
Linux Foundation:  https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash