4 ms·

Sharing CPU resources between user space drivers is certainly a challenge. The best way to view this is that the kernel provides a general purpose solution for

Sharing CPU resources between user space drivers is certainly a challenge. The best way to view this is that the kernel provides a general purpose solution for sharing resources with some associated overhead. Tools like DPDK and SPDK let you opt out of that, but now you are responsible for intelligently sharing the hardware. You, as the application developer, have a distinct advantage though - you only need to solve the problem for your application, and using that knowledge can often lead to more efficient solutions. This may mean dedicating cores to the network or disk, or it may mean working in fixed sized batches, etc.

signa11 10y ago
> ... you only need to solve the problem for your application, and using that knowledge can often lead to more efficient solutions... this ! _exactly_ this :) imho, the fundamental re-architecture of I/O subsystem for x86 machines has kind of relegated this playing field now to mostly solving _only_ s/w problem, rather than a combination of h/w and s/w. for example, earlier if you wanted to write a very high performance node in, say the epc-core e.g. SGW/PGW/MME etc. you would assemble a bunch of folks with very diverse set of expertise. right from h/w i/o subsystem designers who could do npu's, switch-fabrics etc. to driver dudes, to 'infrastructure' folks to application programmers etc. etc. in the current incarnation, a vanilla off the shelf x86 machine is more than sufficient. and if your s/w architecture is _right_, you can scale quite easily.