Correct - things you take for granted like ARP and TCP/IP are completely up to you to take care of. Further, the Kernel has little visibility into most kernel

Correct - things you take for granted like ARP and TCP/IP are completely up to you to take care of. Further, the Kernel has little visibility into most kernel bypass stacks, so /proc or iproute are often blind to what's happening. DPDK does have "kernel interfaces", so you can direct packets to the kernel.