How ByteDance’s Open Compute Innovations Are Shaping Cloud Infrastructure

On August 8, 2024, the Open Compute China Summit in Beijing awarded the inaugural Open Compute Best Practice Award to ByteDance for its extensive contributions to open‑compute technologies.

ByteDance’s achievements include the development of Cloud Firmware (versions 1.0, 2.0, and the upcoming 3.0), making it the first vendor to productize coreboot and LinuxBoot firmware on x86 servers. Since 2020, ByteDance has worked with the OCP community to create an open, simple, and integrated firmware ecosystem, which was accepted by OCP‑OSF in late 2022.

Leveraging the OpenBMC community, ByteDance built a production‑ready BMC solution that now supports DPU‑based and full‑server deployments, contributing over 310 patches to the OpenBMC project.

In system virtualization, ByteDance created the high‑performance VDUSE (vDPA Device in Userspace) framework, providing a unified I/O virtualization layer for containers and VMs, with features such as high availability, hot‑upgrade, and stateful operation, now merged upstream into the Linux kernel and QEMU.

On the kernel side, the STE team focused on memory management optimizations, including the HVO (HugeTLB Vmemmap Optimization) technique and ongoing PTE page‑table improvements that can save up to 100 GB of user‑space page‑table memory on a single node.

These innovations are driven by ByteDance’s open‑source philosophy of using, contributing, and proactively open‑sourcing technology, fostering a virtuous cycle between the company and the broader community.

As AI and large‑model workloads reshape data‑center demands, ByteDance plans to continue investing in open‑compute standards and collaborative ecosystems to deliver more efficient, high‑quality computing services.