Over the years, more and more vendors have embraced DPDK to enable their NICs for userspace packet processing. This trend has advanced DPDK, leading to the development of new APIs with the aim of leveraging the heterogeneous features and capabilities of NICs. This level of diversity in PMDs and APIs is a catalyst for an inconsistent development environment, making it difficult for applications to accommodate all types of NIC. To overcome this, we propose DPDK SoftNIC, which is capable of being programmed to build custom NIC pipelines to augment missing features to HW NICs by using advanced DPDK features without requiring an application redesign. SoftNIC allows the application to be incognizant of the hardware available to it without compromising functionality.
Speakers: Kevin Laatz Reshma Begam Pattan