VPP eVPN Controlplane#

Pim van Pelt (IPng)

• Why: The most substantive talk for anyone working on DC/WAN fabric software. It demonstrates that a fully open-source, commodity-hardware eVPN fabric — DPDK/VPP dataplane plus BIRD control plane — can run a real production network (IPng operates AS8298 with 22 VPP/BIRD routers and ~2,200 BGP adjacencies), not just a lab.
• What: A complete open-source eVPN stack: an eVPN management/control plane for VPP, a custom vppevpn protocol for BIRD, and a management plane (vpp-evpn / epvnd daemon) that orchestrates eVPN services across Mellanox BlueField DPUs at scale targets of O(100) routers, O(1,000) L3 subnets, and O(10,000) P2MP L2 segments.
• How: VPP provides the building blocks (bridge domains, BVIs, VXLAN tunnels, split-horizon groups, learn/flood disabled on tunnels); BIRD speaks BGP eVPN NLRI (MAC/IP/IMET routes, RD/RT, RFC 5512 encapsulation ext-communities for VXLAN) against route reflectors, and the new vppevpn protocol reconciles VPP state with BIRD every N seconds — creating tunnels from IMETs, programming L2FIB from MAC routes. A per-DPU daemon adds a healthchecker (CARP/HSRP-style multicast IPv6 probes), gRPC endpoint, and Prometheus metrics; the whole thing interoperates with Arista EOS, Juniper, Cisco, and Centec VTEPs.
• Where applicable: Broadly adoptable — all components are open source (VPP 26.06+, BIRD 2.19 with a patch) and the demo includes multi-vendor VTEPs, so it's not an island. Performance claims (100Mpps+/100Gbps+ per node on commodity x86) are IPng's own production numbers, and the scale figures are IPng-specific, but the architecture transfers to any operator willing to run DPUs as eVPN PE devices.