npol plugin not loading or not working in VPP 26.02

[Khalid-essaghiry]

Hello,

I tested the new NPol plugin in VPP 26.02 and noticed behavior that may indicate the datapath part is not yet fully implemented.

What works

The following operations work correctly:

• ipsets creation
• rules creation
• policies creation
• attaching policies to interfaces

The configuration is correctly displayed with:

show npol rules
show npol policies
show npol interfaces

Main issue

Even with a policy containing a rule such as:

deny 0.0.0.0/0

traffic is still forwarded normally.

For example:

• ICMP ping continues to work
• packets are not dropped

Feature graph verification

I checked:

show features verbose

but no npol feature appears in:

• ip4-unicast
• ip4-output
• ip6-unicast

This suggests packets are never passing through an npol processing node inside the VPP forwarding graph.

Observation

From testing, NPol currently appears to provide:

IPSET → RULE → POLICY → INTERFACE

but without actual packet enforcement in the datapath.

The plugin seems operational from the configuration/control perspective, but traffic filtering itself does not appear active.

Question

Is this expected behavior in the current state of NPol?

Is datapath enforcement still under development, or is there an additional step required to activate packet processing/filtering?

Thank you.