DPDK is open source. Anyone can use it, contribute to it, and participate in the community. Corporate membership funds the neutral infrastructure that keeps the project independent: CI/CD, test labs, events, and community coordination. It also gives your organization a direct voice in governance.
Members’ maintainers and contributors build professional credibility in the community. Your patches get the context and responsiveness that comes from being a known, invested participant.
Governing Board members vote on budget, lab resources, sub-project approval, and strategic direction. If DPDK’s priorities affect your product roadmap, membership is how you influence them.
Gold members get exclusive access to independent benchmark, functional, and conformance testing at the UNH-IOL Community Lab, plus customer referral for hardware validation.
Open source engagement is a proven driver of engineering talent acquisition and retention. Membership signals to developers that your organization invests in the ecosystem they care about.
Member contributions are highlighted through DPDK and Linux Foundation communications: the DPDK Dispatch newsletter (871+ subscribers), LinkedIn (6,800+ followers), and the annual summit.
$50,000/year
Everything in Silver, plus:
$10,000/year
No fee (non-profit, academic, and government organizations)
“Being a member is important because we want to be on the inside helping set the future direction for the project, not on the outside following a direction set by others. Within the DPDK community, what stands out for me is the level of technical expertise and the spirit of collaboration, with engineers from competing companies working together to build common solutions that benefit everybody.”
Tim O’Driscoll
Product Manager, Intel
DPDK Governing Board Chair
“DPDK is not a one-company or two-company project. There are so many people from different companies, academia, and even small organizations who contribute. It’s flexible, works across many kinds of hardware without vendor lock-in, and provides predictable, ultra-low latency packet processing. That combination of community breadth, technical excellence, and proven real-world use cases is what makes membership so valuable.”
Rashid Khan
Senior Director of Core Platforms, Red Hat
Former DPDK Governing Board Chair
Engineering resources at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL).
All lab costs: hardware, software licenses, and physical space for per-patch testing.
Two events per year, co-managed with the Linux Foundation events team.
Linux Foundation resources to support governance, meetings, and project coordination.
Original content, member communications, and community growth across DPDK and Linux Foundation channels.
Download the membership overview (PDF) | For membership questions, email support@dpdk.org
Individual developers don’t need membership to contribute. Review your first patch or contribute your first patch.
