SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
NETWORKS
How can DPDK access devices from user space?
DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is a set of libraries for implementing user space drivers for NICs (Network Interface Controllers). It provides a set of abstractions which allows a sophisticated packet processing pipeline to be programmed. But how does DPDK work? How is it able to access the hardware directly? How does it communicate with the hardware? Why does it require a UIO module (Userspace input-output)? What are hugepages and why are they so crucial? In this blog post I will try to explain, with a reasonable amount of detail, how a standard kernel space NIC driver works, how a user space program can access hardware and what can be gained from having it do so.
