Hi Neil, Thanks for taking the time to reflect on my ideas.
On 24 April 2015 at 19:00, Neil Horman <nhorman at tuxdriver.com> wrote: > DPDK will always be > something of a niche market for user to whoom every last ounce of > performance is > the primary requirement This does seem like an excellent position. It is succinct, it sets expectations for users, and it tells developers how to resolve trade-offs (performance takes priority over FOO, for all values of FOO). I agree that this niche will always be there and so it seems like there is a permanent place in the world for DPDK. This focus on performance also makes DPDK useful as a reference for other projects. People making trade-offs between performance and other factors (portability, compatibility, simplicity, etc) can use DPDK as a yardstick to estimate what this costs. This benefits everybody doing networking on x86. I suppose that a separate discussion would be how to increase participation from people who are using DPDK as a reference but not as a software dependency. That is perhaps a less pressing topic for the future. OVS is a great example here. If we can make it easy for them to use DPDK > to get > better performance, I think we'll see a larger uptake in adoption. > I will be interested to see how this plays out. I agree it is a great opportunity for DPDK and a chance to take it mainstream. I also think it is fundamentally a missed opportunity of the kernel. OVS would be just fine with a kernel data plane that performs adequately. OVS users don't seem to be in the "maximum performance at any cost" niche defined above. Many of them benefit a lot from the kernel integration. However, if the kernel can't promise the meet their performance requirements then DPDK does seem like a knight in shining armour. It's an exciting time in open source networking :-) Cheers, -Luke