[lrizzo]

I can't comment on HFT because I have no experience on that, and their focus is latency rather than throughput.

For the latter (which matters in routers, for instance), netmap runs on everything (either natively or with some emulation). The intel 10g cards (which DPDK of course supports) are around 3-400$ i think, the 1G cards start around a few 10's of dollars (not that you need userspace networking at 1G).