SANTA CLARA, California — Kicking off the Open Networking Summit (ONS) today, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said it used to be that newly hired engineers at technology companies or other enterprises did not want to be assigned to networking jobs. But that’s changed. “The network is where all the action is happening,” said Zemlin. “It’s this dynamic software-driven piece of their infrastructure.”

He added that “Open source is a huge part of that. There’s been an explosion in the last few years of the number of open source projects.”

Adding even more to the number of open source initiatives, Zemlin today announced a new Linux Foundation project — the Free Range Routing project. FRR is an IP routing protocol suite for the Linux and Unix platforms.

The contributors designed FRR to streamline the routing protocol stack. In addition to network switching and routing, businesses can use FRR for connecting hosts, virtual machines, and containers to the network.

Cumulus Networks, and specifically CTO and co-founder JR Rivers, have played a big role in the project to date, along with contributors from Orange, 6WIND, Big Switch Networks, Architecture Technology Corporation, 128 Technology, and Volta Networks, among others.

Zemlin also announced that the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project has moved to The Linux Foundation.

DPDK was created in 2010 by Intel and made available under a permissive open source license. The open source community was established at DPDK.org in 2013 by 6WIND and has facilitated the continued expansion of the project. Since then, the community has issued 10 major code releases, including contributions from more than 400 individuals from 70 different organizations.

DPDK consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. DPDK now supports all major CPU architectures and NICs from multiple vendors, which makes it suited to applications that need to be portable across multiple platforms.