DASH Workgroup Community Update 2/18/2026

[Kristina Moore]

Hello DASH Open Source Community – thanks for your time over the last 2 weeks.  I’m using a new format this week (and continuing to refine), please provide feedback if you have any. 
I’m also 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 proceed with deletion of the sonic-dash@googlegroups list we used when we began the project.

SONiC‑DASH Workgroup Summary

Meetings covered:

• Feb 11, 2026 and Feb 18, 2026  SONiC‑DASH Workgroup Community Meeting

Activity Summary in query period 1/29 -02/18

• 23 PRs merged in query period
• 41 PRs created in query period

Most Active Repositories:

• sonic-mgmt: 14 PRs created, 5 merged
• sonic-buildimage: 11 PRs created, 8 merged
• sonic-gnmi: 3 PRs merged
• sonic-swss: 2 PRs created, 2 merged

Key Highlights:

• Status update on the SONiC 2025.11 image and Trixie migration. Internal builds are running, with some remaining integration and container-start issues still being worked through.
• Discussion of open technical questions (endianness handling, subnet masking, secure boot), with follow-ups required outside the meeting.
• Review of recent PRs and test enhancements, including service configuration changes and automation coverage.
• Python model work noted as pending review, with next steps after current PRs complete.
• Review of recently merged work and active PRs across DASH, including contributions from AMD, NVIDIA, Cisco, and Microsoft.
• Deep dive on the fast path ICMP redirect test plan, covering multiple flow scenarios and next steps to raise test PRs and assign reviewers.
• Overview of NVIDIA Flow API and CLI contributions, including design documentation and tooling to support HA validation.
• Discussion of a SmartSwitch-specific forwarding issue related to ZMQ and northbound APIs in 2025.11, with a workaround identified and a likely fix involving listener binding changes.
• Status updates on ongoing work: churn testing, disabling DASH HA by default, HA test cases, private link redirect features, and DPU upgrade test cases.

 

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Overall Themes

Focused on stabilizing SONiC 2025.11, advancing DASH fast‑path and HA validation, and reviewing a high volume of community‑contributed PRs (notably NVIDIA and AMD), with increasing attention on SmartSwitch‑specific behavior and northbound/ZMQ interactions.

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Platform & Release Status

• The group reviewed progress on the SONiC 2025.11 image, including the Trixie branch. Internal builds were reported as running, though not all changes were yet integrated into Microsoft build infrastructure .
• A SmartSwitch‑specific forwarding issue was discussed when northbound APIs are enabled by default in 2025.11. The observed workaround was disabling northbound, with discussion pointing to ZMQ listener binding behavior as a likely root cause and a potential fix involving localhost binding .

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Testing, Validation & Fast‑Path Work

• A detailed fast‑path ICMP redirect test plan was presented and discussed, covering multiple flow scenarios including no‑fix, immediate fix after SYN, and delayed fix after TCP establishment. Next steps included raising test PRs and assigning reviewers .
• Ongoing work included HA test cases, churn testing, private link redirect testing, and DPU upgrade test cases. 
• Test enhancements and automation improvements were reviewed during the Feb 11 meeting, including service configuration changes and broader test coverage updates.

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PRs, Contributions & Engagement

• We reviewed recently merged PRs and a large set of PRs ‘awaiting review’ or ‘merge’, with contributions from NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, and Microsoft .
• NVIDIA presented Flow API–related contributions, including references to design documentation (HLD) and CLI tooling to dump and compare flows, intended to support HA testing and validation workflows .
• AMD contributors provided updates on counter‑related and test‑plan work .

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Open Issues & Follow‑Ups

• Open technical questions raised included endianness handling, subnet mask representation, and secure boot considerations, with follow‑ups noted outside the meetings rather than resolved live .
• The Python model work was explicitly called out as pending review, with next steps dependent on completion of current PRs .
• Several PRs required reviewer assignment and follow‑through, which was acknowledged and coordinated during the Feb 18 meeting .

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Close‑Out

By mid-February, our SONiC‑DASH workgroup had:

• Advanced stabilization efforts for SONiC 2025.11
• Made concrete progress on Fast‑Path ICMP redirect validation
• Integrated and reviewed significant contributions
• Identified platform‑specific issues requiring targeted fixes

 

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Weekly PR Rhythm below:

 

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 2/25/2026

 

Meeting Title:  SONiC-DASH-Workgroup Community Meeting #170 & 171

Attendees (12):

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

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

 

Bud Grise - XSightLabs	Mircea Dan Gheorghe - Keysight	Syed Mehemood Ur Rahman - TCS
Don Ewald - Cisco	murali Venkateshaiah  - Cisco	Tatikonda, Srinivas - AMD
Kristina Moore - MSFT	Prabhat Aravind - MSFT	Veerappan, Senthil - AMD
Michael Aronovici  - Cisco	Ramesh Raghupathy  - Cisco	Vivek Reddy Karri - Nvidia

   

 

 

 

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, February 11 | Meeting | Microsoft Teams Recap: SONiC-DASH Workgroup Community Meeting Wednesday, February 18 | Meeting | Microsoft Teams DASH Community https://youtu.be/S1sQf5OccvY https://youtu.be/otv29rDyOsU	2/11/2026 and 2/18/2026 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