OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation's 26.10 release adds Release 17 NTN support and native 5G positioning
The OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation says 26.10 adds Release 17 NTN support; GEO NTN support appeared in 24.04. SRS co-founder Ismael Gomez chairs the project's technical steering committee, and the release notes still mark O-RU and end-to-end tests as outstanding.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: Linux Foundation Newsroom
Why it matters
OCUDU's release notes list Release 17 and positioning features, while also showing that several integrations still need hardware or end-to-end testing. Adoption will depend on deployment evidence.
Ismael Gomez, Software Radio Systems co-founder and CTO, chairs the OCUDU Technical Steering Committee as the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation announced OCUDU 26.10 on October 8th. The release notes list 3GPP Release 17 support for Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), alongside antenna, positioning and network-splitting capabilities. The project's changelog records GEO NTN support in version 24.04, so satellite networking was not new to the codebase in 26.10.
SRS says Gomez and co-founder Paul Sutton met during postdoctoral studies at Trinity College Dublin and founded the company in 2014. OCUDU is an open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation, built on the srsRAN Project and governed through a community technical project. The migration guide describes OCUDU as srsRAN's successor, with the code moved to Linux Foundation governance and a BSD 3-Clause license.
The Linux Foundation's March announcement said the National Spectrum Consortium and the FutureG Office awarded funds to DeepSig and SRS to build OCUDU's initial software. Gomez's role links that engineering history to the project's effort to broaden the codebase into a shared platform for operators, vendors and researchers.
A wider feature set, with a test-status footnote
The October 8th release lists Release 17 support for Non-Terrestrial Networks, the standards category covering satellite links, alongside 8T8R antenna support, beam-management work and O-RAN Split 7.2b. It also includes two-step random access, uplink pre-scheduling and configured grants, plus DTLS signaling encryption and native positioning features. The release notes record GEO NTN support in version 24.04 and Release 17 NTN support in 26.10.
The project's release notes specify what those labels mean in practice. Split 7.2b support is described as baseline and "not yet tested with O-RU"; the listed beam-management baseline also awaits O-RU testing. Angle-based positioning and downlink positioning reference-signal generation are marked as not yet tested end-to-end. The notes separately say VALOR Labs validated OCUDU against O-RAN end-to-end and security test specifications. That project-reported validation does not cover the hardware and end-to-end testing limits noted for particular features.
The release widens what developers can build and test with OCUDU, while integration work remains unfinished for some paths. The release notes do not establish a satellite-network deployment or production use by an operator. The Linux Foundation's announcement provides no named deployment or performance comparison.
OCUDU's technical project describes a permissively licensed CU/DU implementation aligned with 3GPP and O-RAN specifications, with the full L1/L2/L3 stack. The foundation aims to give organizations a common codebase and governance structure, so vendors and research groups do not have to maintain isolated implementations. The project expects shared development and testing to make open RAN components easier to integrate across suppliers. Operator adoption at commercial scale will require evidence beyond the new release notes.
The community is part of the product
The announcement emphasizes participation figures. In the Linux Foundation announcement, Linux Foundation networking executive Arpit Joshipura says the foundation has welcomed 95 new members since launch, while active contributors to the technical project have doubled and participating organizations have expanded tenfold. These are foundation-reported growth claims; the announcement gives neither the starting contributor count nor the baseline for participating organizations. A May Linux Foundation update reported 21 new member organizations since launch, so the newer figure is not self-explanatory as a cumulative total.
Membership figures do not establish a customer list. OCUDU's members include telecom operators, equipment and silicon vendors, cloud providers and research institutions, but membership alone does not establish a paid deployment or a commitment to use the software. The range of members shows interest in the project's interoperability goals, but not market adoption.
RuntimeWire reported in September that GNU Radio joined OCUDU, adding a software-defined radio project that can support physical-layer research and testbeds. The new release and GNU Radio's addition broaden the work available to the community. Contributors still need to turn more of the stack into integrated, repeatable deployments.
The OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit is scheduled for October 20th-22nd in Alexandria, Virginia, co-hosted with Virginia Tech and the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative. The meeting will give engineers a chance to examine the new code with its contributors. OCUDU 26.10 is available in the project's GitLab repository.