Re:Linux Kernel vs. DPDK: HTTP Performance Showdown
by gjulianm on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @04:57AM
(#31985961)
> If I recall correctly, DPDK abstractions themselves cost a bit of NIC performance, so it might be interesting to see a comparison including a raw NIC-specific kernel bypass framework (like the SolarFlare one).
DPDK performs fairly well, even better for the most part. For some years I maintained a modification of the ixgbe kernel driver for Intel NICs that allowed us to perform high-performance traffic capture. We finally moved to DPDK once it was stable enough and we had the need to support more NICs, and in our comparisons we didn't see a performance hit.
Maybe manufacturer-made drivers can be better than DPDK, but if I had to guess that would be not because of the abstractions but because of the knowledge of the NIC architecture and parameters. I remember when we tried to do a PoC of a Mellanox driver modification and a lot of the work to get high performance was understanding the NIC options and tweaking them to get the most for our use case.
DPDK performs fairly well, even better for the most part. For some years I maintained a modification of the ixgbe kernel driver for Intel NICs that allowed us to perform high-performance traffic capture. We finally moved to DPDK once it was stable enough and we had the need to support more NICs, and in our comparisons we didn't see a performance hit.
Maybe manufacturer-made drivers can be better than DPDK, but if I had to guess that would be not because of the abstractions but because of the knowledge of the NIC architecture and parameters. I remember when we tried to do a PoC of a Mellanox driver modification and a lot of the work to get high performance was understanding the NIC options and tweaking them to get the most for our use case.