The OpenDataPlane (ODP) project is a founding initiative by the Linaro Networking Group to produce an open-source, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for the networking Software Defined Data Plane. Linaro Ltd. recently announced the availability of the first Long Term Support (LTS) Monarch release of OpenDataPlane, which will enable other projects to leverage the acceleration provided by the ODP APIs now that the code base will be fully supported for the foreseeable future.

Linaro adds that work already has begun on network protocol stacks, such as OpenFastPath (OFP), products like the nginx web server accelerated with ODP and OFP and libraries like OpenSSL that provide crypto acceleration via ODP. In addition, ODP and ODP-based products, such as OFP, nginx and OpenSSL, now can be made available as packages in popular Linux distributions like Debian, CentOS and OpenEmbedded. To accompany the release, Linaro launched a validation test suite that permits users and vendors to verify API compatibility between different ODP implementations.