OPI Summit on DPUs/IPUs 2026

SONiC DASH programs tenant overlay objects — ENI, VNET, routes, ACL — through the SAI C ABI that dashorch already uses. On a DPU/IPU those objects must land in hardware tables on the card, not in a software switch on the host.
The default path today is a vendor SAI library loaded into syncd. That library talks a proprietary SDK from the host. The SONiC image, the SAI .so, and the DPU firmware become a single-vendor stack. Swap a BlueField for an Intel IPU and you rebuild the NOS.
This talk presents a different seam: SAI northbound, and OPI southbound. libsai_opi_adapter.so is dlopened as libsai.so — the same path every SONiC ASIC backend uses. sai_create_eni becomes CreateInterface + CreateVnic. sai_get_eni_stats becomes GetVnicMetrics. The vendor’s closed SDK stays behind an OPI bridge on the DPU SoC. The host never opens a DOCA or IPDK handle.

We will show, through a working demo,
1. The object mapping contract as a published, vendor-neutral dictionary
2, An end-to-end lab: gNMI Set (SAI-Challenger / gnmic) → APPL_DB → dashorch → in-process SAI → OPI :50051 on the DPU
3. What is live in the .so today (ENI create + stats).
4. Why this split matters for multi-vendor racks