As global networks scale faster than ever, the need for agile, programmable infrastructure has never been in higher demand. Throughout this year, the P4 community continued to advance the state of open source data plane programmability, driving innovation and empowering a new generation of network capabilities. With global collaboration and contributions, and impactful events, P4 continues to be a driving force shaping the future networking landscape.
Below are highlights from an exciting and fast-paced year in the P4 community:
NEW MEMBERS
P4 was excited to welcome Cisco as a new Premier member in 2025. Oxide Computer Company and Xsight Labs also joined as General members, along with several universities and educational institutions as Associate members. View our members
NOTABLE NEWS
In January Intel announced the release of Tofino P4 software to open source, inviting broader participation and enabling new innovation by P4 developers.
P4 WORKING GROUP UPDATES
Regular meetings take place throughout the year to further the development and adoption of P4.
Language Design Working Group
The P4 Language Design Working Group had a productive year, with steady progress on both the language and its ecosystem. A major highlight this year has been the ongoing development of P4-Spectec by PLRG at KAIST, showcased in a P4 Developer Days talk. This work has helped uncover and resolve many ambiguities and bugs in both the P4 Specification and compiler.
Several “quality-of-life” features have been added to the language, such as Verilog-style +: slice operator with clear rules for indices and bounds, [op]= compound assignment operators for integral types,and support for arrays whose elements are not headers or header unions (e.g., bit, int, extern instances), with clearly defined semantics for out-of-bounds access.
After the introduction of For-loops into the language and specification in 2024, the WG is now evaluating whether loop boundedness should be defined in the spec itself or delegated to individual targets.
To better support the global community, meetings were restructured: two regular calls now run every other month, one Asia-friendly and one Europe-friendly.
In 2026, the focus will be on continuing to improve P4-Spectec and moving toward adopting it as the official representation of the P4 specification. There is also strong interest in exploring first-class, Rust-style macros for P4,although this initiative is still in an early phase of discussion.
API Working Group
In 2025, the P4 API working group put a strong focus on making the P4Runtime more powerful, flexible, and easier to use. A key accomplishment was the addition of P4Runtime support for more flexible and advanced group programming, as commonly required in ML networking scenarios. More specifically, groups can now support packet spraying, dynamic load balancing, and global load balancing, where egress ports (and, more generally, actions) can be selected randomly according to a specified distribution or chosen directly by the switch, rather than just deterministically based on a hash. In addition, specific group modes (action-selection mode and resource-allocation mode) can now be configured at the per-group level instead of only at the per-table level, providing finer-grained control. Several incremental fixes and clarifications to the specification were made along the way, tightening and correcting the P4Runtime specification. Furthermore, the P4Runtime Protobufs were made easier to consume in Rust, and the build system and supported OS versions were updated. Last but not least, P4Runtime v1.5.0 has been released and is available here.
Looking ahead to 2026, the group plans to replace the current ad hoc solutions with a standard approach that allows users to specify preferred string formats for common types such as IP addresses, MAC addresses, and ports. This would directly benefit tools like CLIs, GUIs, and debuggers. The group also aims to advance work on P4Runtime for high-performance use cases and on supporting composite values (such as structs and nested structs) as action parameters.
Education Working Group
The Education Working Group played an active role in organizing the P4 Workshop at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, with Fernando Ramos serving as chair and contributing to the definition of the technical agenda. As no major networking-focused academic conferences were held in Europe this year, EuroP4 could not take place; nevertheless, the initiative will be put forward again for 2026.
In parallel, we are preparing a proposal for a SmartNIC tutorial and are currently searching for a suitable conference to which it can be submitted. The WG has also compiled a first list of academic courses in which P4 is currently being taught, which will soon be published among the education materials. The goal of this effort is not only to support academia in teaching P4, but also to significantly expand the reach of P4 in networking education by making it easier for academics to adopt it through hands-on exercises, teaching resources, and pedagogical material—thereby broadening its overall impact.
Finally, we have also been discussing the possibility of submitting a proposal for a Dagstuhl seminar on networking education, where P4 could play an important role.
NEW PROJECT: P4 MLIR
P4 MLIR is a new community-driven initiative and is part of a long-term vision aimed at providing a modern MLIR-based intermediate representation (IR) for P4 programs. The project aims to solve long-standing performance issues with the P4C IR while simultaneously enabling the use of MLIR-based approaches for more comprehensive P4 program analysis, optimization, and transformation. To date, the P4 high-level MLIR dialect has reached a level of completeness that allows it to fully represent the majority of non-trivial, real-world P4 applications. Development is currently focused on adding standard frontend/midend lowering and optimization passes, as well as providing proof-of-concept support for proprietary and open-source (BMV2, eBPF) targets. .. P4MLIR aims to improve the P4 compiler, p4c and is a tool that translates P4 programs into a language readable by a target.
The project does not have a dedicated P4 working group driving it currently and is being led by Anton Korobeynikov, Bili Dong, and Fabian Ruffy.
P4 COMMUNITY AWARDS
2025 SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award honored the Tofino programmable switch and the P4 language. Tofino made programmable data planes accessible to academia and industry, helping establish P4 as the de facto standard for programmable networks. Read More
The 2025 Distinguished P4 Contributor Award was awarded to Vladimir Gurevitch at the 2025 P4 Workshop in recognition for his ongoing outstanding service to the P4 community. He is a leading P4 educator, training 1,500+ people from 500+ organizations via Barefoot Academy, Intel Connectivity Academy, and P4ica. During his tenure at Intel, he ran the Connectivity Research Program, supporting Tofino projects across 300+ universities worldwide.
NEW P4 MEMBER TARGETS
We are pleased to share news and insights this year from P4 community members who have announced new hardware and software devices where P4 programming is leveraged, allowing developers to tailor the network behavior to applications needs with greater agility and control.
- AMD – Pollara
- Cisco – Unified Networking Architecture
- Intel – IPU/DPU
- “Within Intel, we have different NIC product lines for IPUs and FNICs, and also some specific Telco use cases. Convergence of HW and SW across these different vectors is highly important. Designing a HW packet processor that is agnostic to protocol nuances, and based on match-action capabilities instead, provides us the HW convergence, and leveraging P4 as the underlying SW abstraction helps us in keeping our SW investment effectively reused across product lines. As speeds and feeds for IPUs and FNICs keep increasing, to Terabit speeds and beyond, we feel this is the only scalable approach that can keep up with the challenges”. – Deb Chatterjee, Head of Network Acceleration and Tools, Intel
- Xsight Labs – X2 Series Ethernet Switch
- “P4 is Xsight’s language of choice for developing advanced network applications on the X2. With its programmable parser and match-action architecture, the X2 is well-suited for a language like P4. By writing their network programs in P4, an open and standardized language, customers can describe precisely how packets should be processed. These programs then compile down to X-ISA, Xsight’s open instruction set, giving our users exceptional transparency and control. Together, P4 and X-ISA deliver the best of both worlds: the high-level expressiveness of P4 for defining network behavior, and the low-level precision of X-ISA to optimize packet-processing at the instruction level. With this combination we give developers the tools to unlock the full potential of the X2 platform.” – Fabian Ruffy, Software Architect, XSight Labs
Additional P4 Targets
- iWave – SmartNIC
- Silicom – SmartNIC
- A presentation by Silicom about P4 on the ThunderFjord SmartNIC was also featured in a P4 Developer Days webinar earlier this year – view presentation.
2025 EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
2025 P4 Workshop
The P4 Workshop 2025 brought together researchers, industry leaders, and developers from across the programmable networking community to showcase the latest advances in P4 and its expanding role in modern systems. The event was held this year adjacent to the OCP Global Summit and attracted a record number of attendees. View all the presentations from P4 Workshop here.
P4 Developer Days
In 2025, P4 Developer Days webinars brought the community together for a series of virtual events showcasing projects and products built with P4. This webinar series is designed to foster knowledge sharing across the ecosystem and stimulate new ideas. Across 13+ sessions led by academics and industry experts, we highlighted new P4 targets, emerging applications, and active research. View all videos and slides from these insightful talks here.
Google Summer of Code
For the second consecutive year, the P4 Consortium was accepted into Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program funded by Google that enables students to contribute to open source projects guided by P4 community members. Four projects were selected from the many applicants. View the presentations by each of the contributors here.
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2026
As we look ahead to 2026, the P4 Governing Board is energized by the opportunities before us and grounded in our commitment to continuous improvement, innovation, and service to the P4 community. The coming year will be defined not only by strengthening our core programs and partnerships, but also by thoughtfully incorporating emerging technologies—particularly artificial intelligence. By embracing innovation while staying true to our values, we are positioning P4 for a forward-thinking, sustainable, and impactful 2026.
PARTICIPATE IN THE P4 COMMUNITY
- Technical Steering Team (TST) and Working Groups – learn more about how to join regular meetings and working group focuses here.
- Periodic Email Updates – If you have not already registered, please sign up to receive our periodic newsletter with news about members, projects and events within the P4 community.
- 2026 Events – view the full events calendar
- P4Developer Days – ongoing
- P4 GSoC – ongoing
- P4 Workshop – tentatively scheduled for October 2026
