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libsoftmetaroce

libsoftmetaroce is Meta's software reference implementation of MetaRoCE — a complete, functional transport stack that runs on commodity Linux over standard UDP sockets, without specialized hardware. It plays two roles in the MetaRoCE open ecosystem:

  1. Authoritative behavioral model for silicon development — the ground-truth definition of correct MetaRoCE behavior that NIC vendors (programmable and fixed-function alike) implement against.
  2. Foundation of the unified compliance framework — the reference against which the production compliance suite proves that a vendor's hardware implementation matches the specification.

Because it runs over plain UDP sockets on stock Linux, libsoftmetaroce lets developers exercise and validate MetaRoCE semantics — out-of-order delivery, per-path spraying, selective-ack retransmit, dual-sided congestion control — with no MetaRoCE-capable NIC, lowering the barrier for the multi-vendor adoption MetaRoCE is designed to enable. A DPDK-optimized reference implementation is slated for release alongside the specification and compliance framework at the 2026 OCP Global Summit (October).

libsoftmetaroce is the concrete embodiment of the open-spec-plus-compliance-suite-for-multivendor-hardware pattern: the spec says what to build, the compliance suite says whether you built it right, and this reference stack is the executable oracle both lean on.

Seen in

  • systems/metaroce — the protocol this implements.
  • systems/amd-pensando-nic — the hardware implementation validated against this model.
  • topology-independent-transport — why a pure-software UDP stack is a viable reference.
  • open-spec-plus-compliance-suite-for-multivendor-hardware — the enclosing open-standard pattern.
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