[gjulianm]

> 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.