DPDK

What is DPDK

DPDK is the Data Plane Development Kit that consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. Designed to run on x86, POWER and ARM processors. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from the operating system kernel to processes running in user space. This offloading achieves higher computing efficiency and higher packet throughput than is possible using the interrupt-driven processing provided in the kernel.

installation

Version >= DPDK 21.08.0 is requried - download the latest version from:

https://core.dpdk.org/download/

How it works

On supported NIC cards (https://core.dpdk.org/supported/) the ethernet port needs to be unbinded from kernel and binded to DPDK, the command for it is:

list of available network devices:

modprobe vfio-pci

dpdk-devbind.py -s

Network devices using kernel driver
===================================
0000:0b:00.0 'NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet 1639' if=enp11s0f0 drv=bnx2 unused= *Active*
0000:0b:00.1 'NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet 1639' if=enp11s0f1 drv=bnx2 unused=
0000:1f:00.0 'Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 1528' if=ens3f0 drv=ixgbe unused=
0000:1f:00.1 'Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 1528' if=ens3f1 drv=ixgbe unused=

bind both 10gbit ports to vfio-pci driver (this driver is available by default on >= debian10)

dpdk-devbind.py -b vfio-pci 0000:1f:00.0 0000:1f:00.1

bind B port back to kernel:

dpdk-devbind.py -b ixgbe 0000:1f:00.1