OCUDU is carrier-grade open-source 5G RAN software: the CU and DU that sit between the radio and the core. Based on srsRAN, OCUDU started with the same code, the same engineering team, and the same foundation you have built on for years. What changed is the model around it: a permissive licence, a home on GitLab, and Linux Foundation governance that no single company controls.
If you have been building on srsRAN, OCUDU is where that work continues, with more room to grow.
The same foundation
srsRAN has been adopted for more than a decade across commercial, government, and research networks, enabling deployable open-source 5G in the field. OCUDU builds on that same 5G CU/DU codebase. It runs across multiple processor architectures and scales seamlessly from low-SWaP embedded hardware up to dense multi-cell vRAN running in a datacenter.
Because OCUDU builds directly from the srsRAN CU and DU, the lineage is continuous. The documentation and knowledge of the system, the test environments, and much of the existing work from O-RU (O-RAN Radio Unit) vendors, core network vendors, and community development carry straight over.
Migration is not automatic. Custom code has to be ported and revalidated, and CI pipelines moved from GitHub to GitLab. But you are starting from a proven codebase that is well known and trusted, not a blank page. The migration guide shows exactly where OCUDU picks up and what to bring across.
What is new
Three things are new, and each one creates development opportunities that users did not have before.
- The licence moves from AGPLv3 to the permissive BSD 3-Clause Open MPI variant. That frees you to build commercial products on OCUDU without the reciprocal-licensing obligations of AGPL. Take it, build on it, ship it.
- Development now lives on GitLab. That is where the code, the issues, and the merge requests are, and where the day-to-day work happens. A read-only GitHub mirror of the OCUDU repository is also available.
- Governance is neutral by design. The structure is designed so that no single company can steer the project on its own, SRS included. If you are weighing whether to commit to a platform for years, that is the difference between betting on a vendor and building on a foundation.
Where SRS sits
SRS provided the seed code for OCUDU via srsRAN Project, and is the OCUDU Project lead contributor and maintainer today. We wrote the original CU and DU, and we continue to provide the technical leadership to keep OCUDU moving towards each new release.
The project itself is community-governed. SRS currently chairs the Technical Steering Committee, where direction is set in the open and operators, vendors, and researchers have a formal say in where OCUDU goes. The number of contributors to the OCUDU codebase continues to grow, and it is our intention for the TSC to also grow, welcoming new contributors and maintainers from across the wider OCUDU community.
“OCUDU elevates srsRAN to the next level,” said Ismael Gomez, SRS CTO and OCUDU TSC Chair. “now we’re focused on increasing community involvement and allowing OCUDU to thrive under the Linux Foundation’s leadership.”
Where things stand
The first version of OCUDU 26.04 has shipped, and GitLab is live as the project home. The project includes the OCUDU source code, user and developer docs, integration tutorials, a migration guide, a published roadmap, an issue tracker, and open community calls.
While OCUDU is in active development with new contributions daily, the next major release, 26.10, is planned for October 2026, with major feature releases planned on a six-month cadence. Because the roadmap is public and the calls are open, you can see what is coming and weigh in before it lands.
Early integrations
OCUDU is already being adopted and developed further by the community. Many key partners are demonstrating early success with the project, which, in turn, is feeding back into key development milestones.
ISCO brings its interference-cancellation capability to OCUDU as a dApp. ISCO set the requirements for reaching the Layer 1 uplink IQ stream from an external application, and the OCUDU PHY TAP was born: an interface that lets an application read the uplink IQ stream, modify it, and inject it back into the 5G NR physical layer, within O-RAN latency limits. ISCO’s proven Interference Management and Cancellation (IMC) software, which detects and cancels jammers, is now available for OCUDU and is one of the first applications to build on it. It is a material step toward enabling dApps in OCUDU.
Eridan integrated its innovative polar modulation O-RU with the latest OCUDU release in under a day, utilizing OCUDU’s standard O-RAN interfaces. Eridan’s same-day integration success with OCUDU is a testament to O-RAN interoperability and the cleanliness of OCUDU O-RAN interface use in practice.
SUSE and SRS jointly built and validated a production-oriented reference architecture that runs OCUDU’s CU and DU on SUSE Telco Cloud, aligned with Project Sylva, and demonstrated it at MWC 2026. It runs on off-the-shelf servers, Intel Xeon 6 and Supermicro, using an O-RAN Split 7.2 configuration with a software O-RU emulator to exercise the full RAN stack without physical radios. On a 100 MHz TDD configuration, they achieved the target peak rate for this configuration, measuring around 1.4 Gbps down and 100 Mbps up. The reference architecture highlights how versatility and optimizations in the OCUDU software stack enable real-world 5G workloads on general-purpose hardware without the need for proprietary boxes.
These early successes are just the beginning as the community and key partners come together to test and deploy 5G while building towards 6G and the future of telecommunications.
Getting involved
Wherever you are on your OCUDU journey, there are many ways to get involved. If you have been building on srsRAN, the migration guide provides step-by-step guidance. If you are new to the project, you can pull the latest release and stand up a network in a matter of minutes with clear documentation to help you through each step.
From here forward, OCUDU is community-owned, guided by the roadmap, and with major decisions being made in the open. Community working groups and TSC calls are where the project’s direction gets set, and anyone in the community is invited to participate. The schedule and joining details are on the governance wiki. We recommend reviewing past meeting minutes and sitting in on a call to learn where things are and where they’re heading, as well as who is working on what.
When you are ready to give back to the project, open an issue or send a merge request. Good first issues are labelled for newcomers, so you can start small even if you are new to the codebase, and the contribution guide covers the rest.
The srsRAN project has a new home, carrying forward the same purpose: an open RAN foundation you can run, shape, and build on. The door is gitlab.com/ocudu, and it is open. This is your personal invitation.
