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Comment by aloknnikhil | Hacker News Reader

Has there been any comparison on if XDP-eBPF packet processing is faster/slower than pure user-space packet processors like Cisco's VPP, especially the ones with support for DPDK and zero-copy? I ask because user space packet processors are extensively used as virtual switches in container deployments. Assuming XDP-eBPF is faster, I wonder if, in combination with namespaces, there could be an efficient "virtual switch" implemented completely in eBPF.

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Personal experience spanning across my time at Twitter and Facebook, DPDK is definitely faster but it is (/was) a pain in the butt to program and share the NIC with the host. XDP allows you to reuse very many packet parsing / handling capabilities in the kernel while in DPDK world you’re shipping a tiny stack with your app.

Re: Virtual Switch implemented in BPF: see Cilium’s work to connect containers with their BPF based connectors.

That depends on the nic. Mellanox's bifurcated driver is very easy to share with the kernel. Intel's, not so much. Do you mind mentioning which NICs are used at FB?

Also for GP, is anyone using vpp in production?

There is not even need for a bifurcated driver. The upstream kernel has AF_XDP which Intel and Mellanox NICs support in their drivers, and DPDK has official integration for it as well: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/af_xdp.html This will make deploying DPDK significantly easier for those that need/want to use it and allows to share the same driver for pushing packets up to DPDK and into the normal kernel stack with very close to "native" (as in user space driver) DPDK performance (target is ~90-95%).

I'm aware of the xdp support, but it's brand new, and certainly nowhere near as mature as the normal mode. It doesn't even work on most NICs yet.

But I agree that once it's more mature, it will be better overall.

From the latest DPDK docs in your link:

"Current implementation only supports single queue, multi-queues feature will be added later.

Note that MTU of AF_XDP PMD is limited due to XDP lacks support for fragmentation."

That's a non-starter for many use cases, since multiple queues is a fundamental feature of DPDK.

Predominantly, some internal teams at Cisco. VPP and its CNI (Ligato Contiv) seem to be picking up steam off late. This is going by activity in the mailing lists. I know Yahoo Japan uses it.

http://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

Sort of a 'virtual switch' but much more beyond that and all with a BPF data plane. Cilium provides connectivity but also security policy, load-balancing and introspection for container pods. Preferred choice in Kubernetes-based workloads.

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