Kevin Laatz

"With its recent advancements, AFXDP is gaining popularity in the high performance packet processing space. As a result, existing frameworks for packet processing, such as DPDK, are integrating AFXDP support to provide more options for moving packets to user space applications. The challenge with such integration is that both AF_XDP and frameworks like DPDK have their own assumptions and constraints about such things as, for example, how to align or manage packet buffers, making the integration less straight forward than it might appear at first glance.

This talk takes a look at the usability of AFXDP pre-kernel v5.4, before diving into the recent challenges we encountered when integrating DPDK and AFXDP, and how we made changes (on both sides) to allow the two to work together in a much more seamless manner."

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.