Also interested in DPDK.

it functions with virtio drivers

Practically, there’s almost no benefit in using DPDK with virtio.

The Idea is to be able to run all the NIC drivers in userspace, without memcpy and ANY syscalls at all - thus kernel scheduler can’t really affect the perf in any way.

There’s also ability to offload some of the packet processing computations to the NIC’s FPGA directly and even offload packet processing via rDMA from the NIC to a GPU (NVidia Aerial cuBB/cuVNF).

Thus using DPDK requires:

• affine env with isolcpus kernel param
• huge pages support (hugetlb fs)
• DPDK supported NIC with a special poll-mode userspace driver
• specific NIC firmware black magic in case of something flaky like Intel XL710 being used
• proper motherboard IOMMU groups layout

Ideally, the best DPDK NIC is the Mellanox CX4 and CX5 (some of the AWS ENI instances), but it’s fairly imposible to inquery a specific NIC model and firmware version from modern Cloud Hosting Providers.

It would be great if DO published a report regarding the hardware that is being used.