Low-Overhead Linux Networking

I want to do more posts here that are quick roundups of interesting things I’ve read, rather than rambling commentary.

  • DPDK, the Data Plane Development Kit, permits a userspace application in Linux or BSD to bypass the kernel and directly interact with a network card. Handling interrupts to pass data from a 100 Gbps network card through the kernel apparently performs poorly.
  • Selectel’s “Introduction to DPDK: Architecture and Principles” looks like a detailed walkthrough of how it works. (I only skimmed it on the train tonight though.)
  • FD.io is a Linux Foundation project implementing a software dataplane employing vector packet processing (VPP). Its What is VPP? page is a good intro.
  • networking-vpp brings support to OpenStack networking.
  • Ligato and Contiv-VPP bring VPP to Kubernetes (et al.)
  • I’ve run up against mentions of YANG, which is “Yet Another Next Generation” DSL for modeling network data.
  • Intro to networking-vector packet processing is based on a 2018 FOSDEM talk. The Youtube video really helped things “click” for me.

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