DASH Workgroup Community Update 10/08/2025

[Kristina Moore]

Hello DASH Open Source Community –thank you for your time on Wednesday 10/08.  Apologies for the late communications, many of us were at OCP last week.

At the conference,  @Jing Zhang, @Mircea Dan Gheorghe, @nnel...@cisco.com and Fred yue...@cisco.com presented the SmartSwitch HA Demo at the SONiC booth.  It went flawlessly (after a ton of work on their end), and we had a LOT of people attending to take a look and ask questions.  Perhaps they will present  demo for us in the DASH Community soon 😊 
Thanks to you all!

 

 

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

The long awaited sonic-mgmt tests PR19700 for PL NSG, Trusted VNI, Floating NIC, and Return Path ECMP (with @Lawrence Lee from the SONiC team) has been MERGED.  Cisco immediate gave it a try and indicated it looks good, with only 1 minor fix needed so far.   

Re: optimizations:  we reviewed several test-related and memory optimization PRs, including skipping non-applicable tests, adding batch size support for ZMQ consumer, and optimizing memory usage for high-volume configurations, with contributions from NVIDIA and Cisco.  

We cancelled last weeks’ occurrence due to most stakeholders attending OCP. 

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: 

• Example Configuration for Floating NIC: Follow up and provide an update on the example configuration for Floating NIC discussed last week. (@Prabhat Aravind or @Michal Zygmunt)

• Clarification of Inbound/Outbound Lookup Implementation: Send an email listing questions and request all vendors to clarify how inbound/outbound lookup is implemented in their firmware for both normal and Floating modes. (@Michal, @Prabhat)

• VTAP Feature Documentation Presentation: Coordinate with @Pranjal Shrivastava to present the VTAP feature documentation in the next month. (Kristina)

• Config Diff Review and Alignment: Issue 686, Mircea to re-try

• Multiple Inbound Direction Lookup Enhancement: Track and plan the enhancement for programming multiple inbound direction lookup in DASH, with follow-up in Issue 23875 after POC. (Judy (SONiC team), Prabhat)
• DHCP Unique Identifier Issue Resolution: Prioritize and implement a fix for the DHCP unique identifier Issue affecting NVidia during upgrade from 2025_05 to 2025_06, by reverting the change binding to MAC and keeping the vendor-specific change, and update Prabhat on the outcome. (Senthil, Mukesh)

• Route Rule Table Delete Operation Support: Follow up with @Lawrence Lee and @Michal Zygmunt to determine if the controller can send the underlay IP in the delete operation, and update Vivek by end of the week; if not possible, explore using the GET API as an alternative. (@Prabhat)

• SystemD/Trixie Upgrade Issue Follow-Up: Follow up with Sai Krishna to determine if the systemD/Trixie upgrade Issue will be addressed generically for smart switch and multi-ASIC, and coordinate with Murali if additional help is needed. (Prabhat)
• Delete Operation Investigation: Review the delete operation and provide an update on findings. (Ramesh Raghupathy)
• Tagging Consistency: Ensure that requests have the "smart switch" tag for easier tracking and consistency. (All)
• Review Requested PR: Review the PR requested by Prince and provide feedback, or bring it up in the Thursday call if Marian is present. (Marian)

 

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

21 PRs Completed (+8)

13 in To Do (+/- 0)

11 in Draft (+ 3)

42 in Progress (+/- 0)

12 Awaiting Review (+1)

 

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 10/22/2025

 

Meeting Title:  SONiC-DASH-Workgroup Community Meeting #162

Attendees (11):

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	Swami Balasubramanian - Keysight
Gagan Punathil Ellath - Nvidia	murali Venkateshaiah - Cisco	Veerappan, Senthil - AMD
Kristina Moore - MSFT	Oleksandr Ivantsiv - Nvidia	Vivek Reddy Karri - Nvidia
Michael Aronovici	Ramesh Raghupathy - Cisco

 

  

 

Full DASH Community Notes 😊

·          Project Progress and Key Pull Requests: highlighted the completion of 21 items in the last 10 days, including the long-awaited merge of PR19700 for the SONiC management test.

·         Recent PR Merges: 21 items were completed since the last meeting, including the merge of PR19700 for SONiC management tests, which was a significant milestone. Michael Aronovici confirmed testing and noted a minor tweak was needed, but overall the PR looked good. Other notable merges included fixes for documentation, HA-related features, and bug fixes reported by NVIDIA.

·         Ongoing and Awaiting Review PRs: Several PRs remain in progress or are awaiting review, such as support for ZMQ consumer, ENI-based forwarding design for floating NIC, and updates to the ENI forwarding. Discussed the review status and next steps for these PRs, with some items assigned to specific team members for follow-up.

·         Platform-Specific and Test-Related Updates: Platform-specific issues, such as (Issue #24015) the order of DPU and NPU deployment, were discussed with Vivek and Murali clarifying the correct sequence to avoid deployment failures. Deploying the DPU first could lead to a bad state if the DPU did not receive an IP address within 10 minutes.  The bug caused the orchagent to crash if the DPU booted before the DHCP server on the NPU was ready, resulting in an improperly generated database_config.json and missing DPU databases. The resolution requires the NPU config to be deployed before the DPU image. 

·         Tagging and Tracking: Murali requested that such issues be tagged with 'smart switch' for easier tracking, and Kristina confirmed that the tag was present.

·         Test-related PRs, including those for skipping DHCP relay events and aligning FIB tests, were also highlighted as completed.

·         Upcoming Actions and Review Assignments: outlined upcoming actions, including checking on in-progress PRs on October 15th and 29th, and requested that Marian review a specific PR as requested by Prince. Oleksandr confirmed the review assignment, and Kristina planned to follow up in the next meeting if needed.

 

·         Test and Memory Optimization Improvements: reviewed several test-related and memory optimization PRs, including skipping non-applicable tests, adding batch size support for ZMQ consumer, and optimizing memory usage for high-volume configurations, with contributions from NVIDIA and Cisco.

·         Test Skips and Adjustments: Tests that were not applicable to certain platforms, such as the ZMQ GNMI test for smart switch and skipping the NPU to DPU interface test, were identified and marked to be skipped. Michael Aronovici confirmed that alternative tests covered the necessary functionality.

·         Memory Optimization PRs: NVIDIA contributed PRs to add batch size support for ZMQ consumer and optimize memory usage by processing batch sizes at a time, which aimed to speed up applying high-volume DASH configurations and reduce peak memory usage.

·         Platform-Specific Test Additions: Additional test-related PRs included adding a key for software BFD remote for HA, handling multiple keys in DPU state DB, and fixing hardcoded object types in macros, with Cisco and the SONiC team in China contributing to these improvements.

·         Bug Status and POC Impact: Oleksandr reported that most bugs would be deferred to the 202511 release as they were not blocking the current POC, and Kristina confirmed that the list was updated accordingly.

·         Meeting Schedule Update: Kristina announced that the next meeting would likely be canceled due to overlapping schedules with OCP, as many team members would be attending the event.

 

·         Delete Operation Investigation: Review the delete operation and provide an update on findings. (Ramesh Raghupathy)

·         Inbound/Outbound Lookup Clarification: Clarify the implementation details of the inbound/outbound lookup and coordinate with Pranjal to present VTAP to the community when ready. (Kristina)

·         Tagging Consistency: Ensure that requests have the "smart switch" tag for easier tracking and consistency. (All)

·         Review Requested PR: Review the PR requested by Prince and provide feedback, or bring it up in the Thursday call if Marian is present. (Marian)

 

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…
Links to Recording	Teams: Recap: SONiC-DASH Workgroup Community Meeting Wednesday, October 8 | Meeting | Microsoft Teams DASH Community:  https://youtu.be/wJE0g1oEFFQ YouTube Behavioral Model: No agenda this week	10/08/2025 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