Maybe I missed something, but the argument that was stated in that talk, "DPDK is not linux," is not very clear to me. How is "not linux" a bad thing?
I'm not saying DPDK is perfect. As an user, here are some of the most annoying things about DPDK:
- 100% CPU, even in down time. There has been works done recently in power management for DPDK but it still is quite limited.
- Debugging is difficult. Valgrind doesn't even work ootb.
- Very limited tool set compared to linux. For example no tcpdump.
- Setting up is cumbersome. Allocating hugepages must be done soon after reboot, NICs must be bound to uio,...
- Ad-hoc Layer 4-7.
That said, some of the packet processing libraries that come with DPDK is awesome. Once you get through the first few hurdles the dev experience is actually quite nice. I think combining DPDK with XDP is very promising.
I'm not saying DPDK is perfect. As an user, here are some of the most annoying things about DPDK:
- 100% CPU, even in down time. There has been works done recently in power management for DPDK but it still is quite limited.
- Debugging is difficult. Valgrind doesn't even work ootb.
- Very limited tool set compared to linux. For example no tcpdump.
- Setting up is cumbersome. Allocating hugepages must be done soon after reboot, NICs must be bound to uio,...
- Ad-hoc Layer 4-7.
That said, some of the packet processing libraries that come with DPDK is awesome. Once you get through the first few hurdles the dev experience is actually quite nice. I think combining DPDK with XDP is very promising.