LF Networking

LF Networking (LFN) is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. It was formed in January 2018 by combining six networking projects that the Linux Foundation already hosted, ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, FD.io, PNDA and SNAS, with 83 member organisations at the start. Joining was voluntary, and each project kept its own technical steering committee, release roadmap and website, while staff and money were pooled under one governing board. The governing board, made up of representatives of paying members, oversees finance, budgets and strategy, and a Technical Advisory Council (TAC) is responsible for communication and collaboration between the projects.

Most of its work serves telecom operators and their suppliers. In October 2026 the LFN wiki listed five graduated projects: OpenDaylight, an SDN controller; ONAP, for orchestrating network services; FD.io, home of the VPP software data plane; Nephio, Kubernetes-based automation for network functions; and Anuket, reference specifications for telecom clouds. Incubating were the 5G Super Blueprint, L3AF, a project for eBPF kernel functions, and the O-RAN Software Community; CNTi and Paraglider, a control plane for tenant networking on public clouds, were in the sandbox, and Duranta, Essedum, StratoWeave and OpenAN were candidates. Nine projects had been archived or merged, including Tungsten Fabric, the SDN platform Juniper open-sourced in 2013 as OpenContrail.

For someone choosing a technology, an LFN badge says the project is run in the open at the Linux Foundation, and the stage says how far it has come: graduated projects have shown a documented release process, a diverse community and the ability to run themselves, and they get a voting seat on the TAC. The badge doesn’t promise that a project is still widely used, and archiving is a real risk to watch: a project can be archived after 12 months without significant commits, and Tungsten Fabric, PNDA and SNAS, three of the first seven, are already archived.