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by arter4 1087 days ago
Interesting. I hear a lot more about sendfile(), kTLS and general kernel space tricks than I do about DPDK and userspace networking, but maybe it's just me.

I do wonder what trend is going to win: bypass the kernel or embrace the kernel for everything?

The way I see it, latency decreases either way (as long as you don't have to switch back and forth between kernel and user space), but userspace seems better from a security standpoint.

Then again, everyone is doing eBPF, so probably the "embrace the kernel" approach is going to win. Who knows.

1 comments

The people who use DPDK and the like are a lot quieter about it. The nature of kernel development means that people tend to hear about what you're doing, while DPDK and userspace networking tends to happen in more proprietary settings.

That said, I'm not sure many people write webservers in DPDK, since the Kernel is pretty well suited to webservers (sendfile, etc.). Most applications that use kernel-bypass are more specialized.