The FD.io Continuous System Integration and Testing (CSIT) project has published its CSIT 26.06 Release Report, continuing the community’s work to provide transparent, repeatable performance testing for high-performance networking technologies. Published July 8, the latest report covers VPP 26.06 performance alongside updates to the CSIT testing framework, infrastructure, test coverage, and supporting DPDK and TRex environments.
Advancing Automated, Repeatable Performance Testing
One of the biggest themes of CSIT 26.06 is continued investment in the test framework itself. The release uses CSIT test environment version 19 and advances the project’s “Hands-Free Releasing” work, designed to automate the CSIT release flow so a single action can drive the full release pipeline.
The project has also moved away from downloading generic VPP builds from Packagecloud in favor of local compilation and platform-specific builds. After introducing platform builds for Arm systems in earlier releases, CSIT 26.06 extends the approach across three generations of Intel Xeon processors, with restoring IPsec performance identified as a key motivation.
Together, these improvements are intended to make performance results more representative of the hardware being tested while further reducing manual effort in the release process.
Broader VPP Performance Coverage
CSIT 26.06 introduces initial performance coverage for VPP’s SFDP functionality, while also evolving the physical infrastructure used to generate performance data. Three new testbeds (2n-gnr, 3n-gnr, and 3n-srf) have been added, while the 3n-snr and 3n-icxd environments have been retired.
The release report provides selected VPP 26.06 performance results across a broad range of networking workloads, including:
- IPv4 and IPv6 routing
- Software- and hardware-accelerated IPsec
- NAT44
- Geneve, VXLAN, GTP-U, and WireGuard tunneling
- Packet reassembly
Testing spans multiple hardware platforms, NICs, drivers, link speeds, frame sizes, and core counts, giving developers and operators the ability to examine how VPP behaves across diverse deployment scenarios.
The CSIT dashboard also makes it possible to directly compare VPP 26.06 with VPP 26.02, including latency, Maximum Receive Rate (MRR), No-Drop Rate (NDR), and Partial Drop Rate (PDR) measurements.
Tracking Regressions and Known Issues
An important part of CSIT’s value is that it does more than publish headline performance numbers. The project documents known issues, fixes, and root-cause analyses so users can better understand changes between releases.
For CSIT 26.06, the team identified and documented regressions involving areas including AWS throttling, IPv6 performance associated with platform builds, and AES128-GMAC performance. The release also records five previously reported issues that were fixed or no longer affect testing, including issues involving IP fragmentation, memif with jumbo frames, dev_iavf queue configuration, PDR behavior, and QUIC testing.
This transparency helps distinguish genuine software performance changes from test-environment variability or known infrastructure limitations — an essential capability when benchmarking packet-processing software at high throughput.
DPDK and TRex Updates
While DPDK performance testing was not run as part of the CSIT 26.06 release, the CSIT environment has been updated to DPDK v26.03, preparing the framework for future testing against the newer release.
The TRex traffic generator remains at version 3.03, with no major TRex-specific test updates included in CSIT 26.06.
Explore the CSIT 26.06 Results
The full CSIT 26.06 dataset is available through the interactive CSIT dashboards, where users can filter results by infrastructure, networking workload, frame size, CPU core count, test methodology, and other parameters.
Users can explore individual VPP 26.06 results, compare them directly with VPP 26.02, review coverage data, or search for specific test configurations.
For the FD.io community, CSIT continues to provide something particularly valuable: an open and reproducible view into the performance of high-speed packet-processing software across increasingly diverse infrastructure.
Explore the complete CSIT 26.06 Release Report and performance data:
CSIT 26.06 Release Report
