[Bloat] new "vector packet processing" based effort to speed up networking

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 11 Feb 2016, Dave Täht wrote:

> Someone asked me recently what I thought of the dpdk. I said:
> "It's a great way to heat datacenters". Still, there's momentum it
> seems, to move more stuff into userspace.

Especially now that Intel CPUs seem to be able to push a lot of PPS 
compared to what they could before. A lot more.

What one has to take into account is that this tech is most likely going 
to be deployed on servers with 10GE NICs or even 25/40/100GE, and they are 
most likely going to be connected to a small buffer datacenter switch 
which will do FIFO on extremely small shared buffer memory (we're talking 
small fractions of a millisecond of buffer at 10GE speed), and usually 
lots of these servers will be behind oversubscribed interconnect links 
between switches.

A completely different use case would of course be if someone started to 
create midrange enterprise routers with 1GE/10GE ports using this 
technology, then it would of course make a lot of sense to have proper 
AQM. I have no idea what kind of performance one can expect out of a low 
power Intel CPU that might fit into one of these...

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se