Lots of people are doing userspace networking to go faster. See netmap, DPDK, for other examples, or look at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/

Lots of people are doing userspace networking to go faster. See netmap, DPDK, for other examples, or look at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/pdfs/201408-sigcomm2014-specialization.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/pdfs/201408... In our case the kernel buys us very little but costs a lot, as others correctly pointed out in this thread. We spent a lot of time working on our performance via the kernel, with moderate success, but userspace talking directly to the NIC was a huge leap in performance.