Stephen Hemminger

One of the challenges of doing software network applications is observing the inputs, outputs, and what the application is doing with them. Linux provides a rich tool set with eBPF but integrating this into a DPDK application is challenging. The DPDK libraries for capturing is incomplete which leads to lots of time debugging the tools. This talk addresses these issues, recommends solutions and proposes enhancements to make developers live easier.

The DPDK provides a limited form of packet capture, but it only works on a single interface with no filtering and inaccurate timestamps. I go over what packet capture does now, how it can be improved, and how it can be integrated with other tracing.

This talk is an extension of the talk (based on community feedback) given in 2019 at the DPDK userspace summit.

The Intel DPDK provides a platform for building high performance Network Function Virtualization applications. But it is hard to get high performance unless certain design tradeoffs are made. This talk focuses on the lessons learned in creating the Brocade vRouter using DPDK. It covers some of the architecture, locking and low level issues that all have to be dealt with to achieve 80 Million packets per second forwarding.