Re: Beyond DPDK 2.0

[Luke Gorrie <luke-vEt0keKvJLw@public.gmane.org>]

Hi Neil,

Thanks for taking the time to reflect on my ideas.

On 24 April 2015 at 19:00, Neil Horman <nhorman-2XuSBdqkA4R54TAoqtyWWQ@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> DPDK will always be
> something of a niche market for user to whoom every last ounce of
> performance is
> the primary requirement


This does seem like an excellent position. It is succinct, it sets
expectations for users, and it tells developers how to resolve trade-offs
(performance takes priority over FOO, for all values of FOO). I agree that
this niche will always be there and so it seems like there is a permanent
place in the world for DPDK.

This focus on performance also makes DPDK useful as a reference for other
projects. People making trade-offs between performance and other factors
(portability, compatibility, simplicity, etc) can use DPDK as a yardstick
to estimate what this costs. This benefits everybody doing networking on
x86.

I suppose that a separate discussion would be how to increase participation
from people who are using DPDK as a reference but not as a software
dependency. That is perhaps a less pressing topic for the future.

OVS is a great example here.  If we can make it easy for them to use DPDK
> to get
> better performance, I think we'll see a larger uptake in adoption.
>

I will be interested to see how this plays out.

I agree it is a great opportunity for DPDK and a chance to take it
mainstream.

I also think it is fundamentally a missed opportunity of the kernel. OVS
would be just fine with a kernel data plane that performs adequately. OVS
users don't seem to be in the "maximum performance at any cost" niche
defined above. Many of them benefit a lot from the kernel integration.
However, if the kernel can't promise the meet their performance
requirements then DPDK does seem like a knight in shining armour.

It's an exciting time in open source networking :-)

Cheers,
-Luke