DASH Workgroup Community Update 10/22/2025

[Kristina Moore]

Hello DASH Open Source Community –thank you for your time yesterday, and it was great to see so many at OCP. 

@mur...@cisco.com – appreciate you for recently joining the SONiC-DASH Linux Foundation mailer list.  For the rest of our recipients, 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. 

@Michael Aronovici (aronovic) submitted a PR 20998 Fix:  Restore dash smartswitch vnet after protobuf updates to support the sonic-mgmt tests PR19700 for PL NSG, Trusted VNI, Floating NIC, and Return Path ECMP that was merged last week.  This will restore VNET SmartSwitch testing after protobuf and PR19700 changes.  In addition, we have another fix from Cisco to address the BFD probe update.  Much appreciated Cisco team! 

 

We also reviewed completed PRs since the last meeting, including fixes for DPUs in a bad state, ZMQ memory optimizations, and updates to batch size handling, and more contributions from NVIDIA and Cisco.     

@Marian Pritsak from Nvidia has agreed to review the PR to expand the VxLAN UDP SRC Port definition and PR2175 for flow API in the OCP repo. 

@mukesh.moopathvelayudhan from AMD contributed a fix to the FlexCounter meter class range, resolving a crash in Syncd when creating ENI objects – thanks Mukesh!

And lastly, we continue to have a contribution back up for grabs.  It would be great to have a volunteer to suggest a PR in the dash-sonic-hld (in the SONiC repo here) for commands to show ENI counters and DPU global metrics – please submit a PR if you are interested!

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

Follow-ups: 

• OCP PR Review and Demo: Review the OCP PR once the second switch is available and plan a demo for the community. (@Mircea-Dan Gheorghe, @Alberto Villarreal)
• PR 2175 [DASH] Add flow bulk get session event data struct Pipeline Issue: Replace the branch for PR 2175 to trigger a new pipeline run and resolve the outdated build issue. (@Marian Pritsak)
       Remind Microsoft reviewers (Riff or Prince) to merge PR 2175 after pipeline checks are successful. (Prabhat)
• PR 683 Review Update ENCAP_U1 functionality by u1_* headers emission and u1_ipv4 checksum for adding missing D parser emission in the repository. (@Marian Pritsak)
• Cisco Golden Config Dark Mode Impact: Investigate and address the impact of default dark mode on Cisco's golden config generation code path for 2025/05 release. (@r...@cisco.com)
• ACL Test for VNET to VNET: Sync with Prince to determine priority and next steps for enabling or skipping ACL tests for VNET to VNET SmartSwitch scenario. (@Prabhat Aravind)
• PR 1669 [DASH] Fix FlexCounter bulk get DASH ENI meter class range: Assign a reviewer for the Flex Counter PR contributed by Mukesh. (@Prabhat Aravind)
• PR 20998 Fix:  Restore dash smartswitch vnet after protobuf updates and PR19700 merge (@Lawrence Lee)

 

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

15 PRs Completed (-6)

13 in To Do (+/- 0)

11 in Draft (+/- 0)

44 in Progress (+2)

14 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 – tomorrow is our 1st Wednesday 'week off', see you on 10/29/2025

 

Meeting Title:  SONiC-DASH-Workgroup Community Meeting #163

Attendees (17):

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

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

 

Abdul Rouff - Nvidia	Gagan Punathil Ellath - Nvidia	Marian Pritsak - Nvidia	Oleksandr Ivantsiv - Nvidia
Amita Gavirneni - Nvidia	Igor Kholobayev - Keysight	Michael Aronovici - Cisco	Prabhat Aravind - MSFT
Bud Grise - XSightLabs	Joel Moses - F5	Mircea Dan Gheorghe - Keysight	Ramesh Raghupathy - Cisco
Don Ewald - Cisco	Kristina Moore - MSFT	murali Venkateshaiah - Cisco	Swaminathan Balasubramanian - Keysight
			Veerappan, Senthilnathan - AMD

 

  

 

Full DASH Community Notes 😊

•  OCP Conference Recap and HA Demo: provided an overview of the team's participation at the OCP conference, highlighting the successful SmartSwitch HA demo presented by Jing, Mircea, Fred, and Narasima, and noted the strong attendance and interest from the community despite the late hour.

• Future DASH HA Demo: Kristina requested a demo to the DASH community in a future meeting.

• Project Board and Recent Pull Requests Review: reviewed the DASH project board, discussed recently completed PRs, pending reviews, and technical fixes, and coordinated next steps for outstanding items.

• Completed Work Items: highlighted completed PRs since the last meeting, including fixes for DPUs in a bad state, ZMQ memory optimizations, and updates to batch size handling, and contributions from NVIDIA and Cisco.
• BFD Probe and SmartSwitch Test Updates: A fix from Cisco addressed the BFD probe update, and another update ensured SmartSwitch-related tests are excluded on non-SmartSwitch testbeds.
• Pull Request Review Assignments: Marian agreed to review and update specific PRs, including expanding the VxLAN UDP SRC Port definition and flow API PRs.
• Pipeline and Merge Coordination: For PR #2175, Prabhat was asked to merge after confirming permissions, but pipeline failures due to outdated builds required Marian to rebase the branch to trigger new checks.

• Technical Discussions on SmartSwitch, Dark Mode, and Configuration: discussed technical changes related to SmartSwitch dark mode defaults, golden config deployment, VNET SmartSwitch testing, and ACL test priorities.

• Dark Mode Default and Golden Config: discussed making dark mode the default for SmartSwitch in the 2025/05 release, noting that this change would affect Cisco's golden config generation and DPU role settings; Ramesh agreed to investigate and report back.
• VNET SmartSwitch Test Restoration: Michael Aronovici explained their fix to restore VNET SmartSwitch testing after protobuf and PR19700 changes, with adjustments made based on Lawrence's review; the update is pending final review and merge.
• ACL Test Status: discussed the status of ACL tests for VNET to VNET, confirming that ACL tests are not currently included and considering whether to prioritize fixing them, with Prabhat to consult with Prince on priorities.
• Motivation for Test Coverage: Murali emphasized the importance of maintaining both VNET and PL test coverage to ensure ongoing compatibility with underlying changes, even if VNET is not strictly required.

• Custom BFD, FlexCounter, and Other Technical Fixes: discussed recent technical fixes, including custom BFD changes by Jing, an a FlexCounter fix by Mukesh.

• Custom BFD Changes: Jing made significant changes to custom BFD in preparation for the HA demo, with the PR now marked as ready for review.
• FlexCounter Meter Class Range Fix: Mukesh contributed a fix to the FlexCounter meter class range, resolving a crash in Syncd when creating ENI objects; Prabhat agreed to assign a reviewer for the PR.

• Upcoming Activities:

• Future Demos and Presentations: Mircea updated the group on ongoing work with OCP PRs and suggested a future Community demo for those who missed the OCP event.
• General Community Updates: Kristina reminded the group about upcoming presentations at NANOG by Murali, Vijay and Kristina.  Also referenced recent attendance at John Carney's OPI 800G HA HERO demo.

 

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: Recap: SONiC-DASH Workgroup Community Meeting Wednesday, October 22 | Meeting | Microsoft Teams DASH Community https://youtu.be/rrPbTnIHkcc	10/22/2025 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