VyOS Networks Blog

Happy September to everyone!

We haven't published an expanded blog post about VPP for a while, so it’s a good time to fulfill your curiosity and share the latest updates.

Over the past few months, we’ve made important progress: VPP has been promoted to a core feature, packaging and updates are now aligned with the base OS, smoke tests help catch regressions, fail‑safes have been added, and we’ve defined our initial hardware targets. Here’s what that means for you and what comes next.

Now part of the system

The biggest step forward is promoting VPP from an add‑on to a feature in the base system. This means VPP is now considered stable enough to be part of VyOS’s core offering and is available in rolling releases.

A lot of behind‑the‑scenes work went into making this happen. Now development moves in sync with the rest of the system, and every rolling‑release customer gets VPP delivered automatically.

For you, this means no extra installation steps or version mismatches to worry about. Every VyOS update comes with a fresh, compatible VPP data plane. It’s a big improvement for usability and consistency when managing system images and updates.

Making VPP part of the core also raises the bar for quality. Every change is tested with smoke tests to prevent regressions and ensure features work as expected.

Stability is the goal

Our main objective for the VPP data plane in VyOS 1.5 is stability. VPP is powerful but also fragile if misused. To help, we’ve introduced fail‑safe mechanisms to stop obviously incorrect configurations and reduce risks.

We cannot validate VPP on every piece of hardware that runs VyOS. Instead, we are focusing on platforms and NICs we can test ourselves. That’s the only way to guarantee reliability.

Compatibility

We are targeting high‑performance devices. The initial baseline is support for 100 Gbps interfaces, with the goal of enabling multi‑hundred‑gigabit deployments.

At this stage, don’t expect compatibility with low‑performance hardware. That doesn’t mean it’s off the table forever, but the main target is high‑performance use cases. If you need support for power‑efficient or special platforms, reach out to our sales team—we’re open to collaboration.

What features to expect

We’re focusing on core features needed for the most common use cases:

• Routing with dynamic protocols (BGP recommended; OSPF validated)

• Tunneling interfaces: GRE, IPIP, VXLAN

• L2 forwarding with bridges and xconnect (fast direct connection between two interfaces)

• ACLs for filtering by MAC, IP, protocols, and ports

• NAT: NAT44 (SNAT/DNAT) and high‑performance CGNAT for large‑scale deployments

• sFlow support for traffic statistics

• IPFIX for detailed analytics

• IPsec offloading for cryptographic acceleration in the data plane

• High availability with VRRP

These features integrate smoothly with kernel interfaces and routing tables.

Documentation is here

Alongside integration into the base OS, we’ve published documentation: https://docs.vyos.io/en/latest/vpp/index.html

As this is still a new feature, the docs will evolve with your feedback. Please explore, ask questions, and suggest improvements.

Try and tell us what you think

If you’re thinking about using VPP in production, now is the right time to test it. Remember: VyOS LTS releases do not introduce new features or major changes. Feedback before VyOS 1.5 LTS is finalized has the best chance of being included.

For commercial deployments that plan years ahead, trying VPP in rolling releases today will ensure it meets your expectations.

We’re also tuning the data plane in collaboration with several projects already—yours could be next.

What are the benefits

Even now, the performance gains are clear. VPP achieves the same forwarding speed as kernel routing while using 10–15× fewer CPU cores. That’s a game changer for many high‑performance and large‑scale scenarios.