OPI Summit on DPUs/IPUs 2026

WorldTech IT builds Network Engine, a purpose-built hypervisor for network virtual appliances, on an open-source foundation. Today we don't ship with OVS. Our supported NICs span Intel E823 and X710, but only E823 supports switchdev offload, so there's no consistent path across the matrix. OVS-DPDK covers X710, but most of our NVAs already run their own DPDK fast path, so stacking DPDK in the host OVS just burns CPU cores twice. Instead we lean on Linux bridges with NIC hardware acceleration, virtio multi-queue tuning, and SR-IOV/IOMMU passthrough where NVAs need maximum performance.
I'm sponsoring OPI Blueprint 003: OVS offload on a DPU, starting with NVIDIA BlueField-3 since it's already largely packaged there, with the goal of bringing that pattern to the rest of the ecosystem for both KVM and KubeVirt. Move OVS to the DPU and switching stops costing host CPU cores at all. I'll cover what we've hit in product engineering, where the blueprint stands, and why turning one vendor's example into an ecosystem standard is the whole point of OPI.