That's the point of DPDK: to get the kernel out of the way of packet processing. Userland packet processing (in network context) is much more flexible and less

That's the point of DPDK: to get the kernel out of the way of packet processing. Userland packet processing (in network context) is much more flexible and less brittle than forcing certain functionality to exist solely in the Kernel layer. However things do exist that allow you to (mostly) transparently re-jigger a standard app's TCP/IP calls. One such example is using LD_PRELOAD to "hijack" the sys-calls for certain things and snake it to your (super high performance) userspace app! There's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the open source networking world (DPDK, VPP/FDio, Network Service Mesh, etc). I really recommend digging into it!