The FD.io community continues to push forward on both feature velocity and production-grade validation with the latest VPP 26.02 and CSIT 2602 releases. Together, these updates show steady momentum across the software dataplane itself and the rigorous testing framework that helps users evaluate performance, coverage, and release-to-release comparisons.
On the VPP side, release 26.02 delivers a substantial update with more than 516 commits since the previous release, including 123 fixes. The release brings a mix of platform enablement, protocol work, plugin innovation, and infrastructure improvements that expand what operators and developers can build with VPP.
A few highlights stand out immediately. VPP 26.02 adds a native IGE device driver for Intel Gigabit Adapters including the i211, i225, and i226, and updates its DPDK integration to DPDK 25.11 along with rdma-core 60.0. The release also introduces a new Network Policies plugin, a Software RSS plugin, a Shared Elog plugin with client library support, session-aware service chaining, basic Stateful Data Plane services, and updates for the Marvell Octeon device driver.
The release also deepens VPP’s work in modern transport and application-layer networking. HTTP enhancements include multiple QPACK decoding and encoding improvements, an HTTP/3 framing layer, an HTTP/3 core skeleton, and H3 client-side support. Host stack applications also gain an HTTP CONNECT proxy client and basic redirect support for the HTTP client. For security-focused deployments, VPP 26.02 adds support for retrieving peer certificates and server-side mTLS in the TLS and TLS engine plugins, while IPSec gains unified crypto and HMAC handling for ESP.
Additional developer and operations-focused improvements round out the release, including a dynamic configuration API in the VPP communications library, a native fuse filesystem implementation, pointer-based next frame macros, and runtime time display support. The API changes section also shows several newly added npol_* API messages, aligning with the new network policies capabilities in this release.
Complementing the software release, CSIT 2602 provides the validation lens for VPP 26.02. Published on March 11, 2026, the release report includes per-release performance data, side-by-side comparisons of VPP 26.02 versus VPP 25.10, and coverage data that users can explore through the CSIT dashboards. CSIT organizes testing by DUT version, infrastructure choice, traffic profile, frame size, core count, and test type, making it easier to examine how the release behaves under different conditions.
The selected CSIT performance coverage for VPP 26.02 spans a broad cross-section of real networking workloads. Tests cover IPv4 and IPv6 routing; IPSec; host stack QUIC, TCP, and UDP; NAT44 throughput and connection-per-second scenarios; tunnels including Geneve, VXLAN, GTP-U, and WireGuard; and reassembly. Those workloads are exercised across multiple environments, including Intel E810 and NVIDIA/Mellanox CX6 and CX7-based setups, as well as cloud instances using AWS ENA-backed platforms.
Taken together, VPP 26.02 and CSIT 2602 reflect the dual strengths of the FD.io community: rapid innovation in the dataplane and disciplined, transparent validation of performance and coverage. For users building high-performance network functions, cloud networking stacks, or security and service-chaining solutions, this release cycle offers both meaningful new capabilities and the test data needed to evaluate them with confidence.
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