[scrubs]

Note that Solarflare requires a per NIC license to get that by-pass. And like Melanox those NICs are not cheap. Kernel by-pass on COTS without recourse to high end NICs w/ or w/o FPGA and the like is needed. I am benchmarking eRPC built on top of DPDK on AWS to that end [1]. And not having to play sys-admin and figure out configs or at least simplifying that work would help. DPDK isn't a necessarily straightforward library. [1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi19-kalia.pdf

[deadgrey19]

FWIW - I don't think it would be that hard to port VMA or ExaSOCK to run on top of DPDK, certainly less effort than making a whole new category of operating system!

But ... selling the hardware is where those companies make their money, so there's not much of a business case for making your free and open-source software run on other people's (cheap) NICs.