Networking

DPDK

Data Plane Development Kit — userspace networking that bypasses the kernel.

In plain terms

Polled-mode drivers. Hundreds of millions of packets per second on commodity hardware. Used by load balancers, telecom NFV, high-frequency trading.

Origin

Intel released DPDK in 2010 to bypass the Linux kernel for high-rate packet processing. Became open source in 2013, hosted by the Linux Foundation in 2017.

Where it shows up in production

OVN / OVS-DPDK Open vSwitch in DPDK mode handles millions of pps per core.
F5, A10 load balancers Commercial appliances built on DPDK; multi-100Gbps throughput per box.
High-frequency trading Kernel-bypass plus DPDK for sub-microsecond order paths.

Sources & further reading

Docs dpdk.org — official docs

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