Intel DPDK - A Technology that is Thriving

For far too many times, the world of open source software gives way to a plethora of standards and reference designs that are supposed to make users’ life easier, improve performance, and security; often making it onto many conference slides as best examples. Some come, some are left behind, but those that manage to stick are continuously reinvented on board the open source high speeding train. Withstanding the test of time, and also gaining wide community adoption, Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) technology always comes up in discussions about the highest performance requirements and the fastest time-to-market.

Standing at the inflection point of hardware architectural innovation and software enhancements, Intel DPDK is a set of optimized libraries and drivers. Not a software stack per se, this set of libraries essentially maps the hardware registrants in the user space resulting in great performance improvements from the hardware up to the applications. If user space was a roaring highway with no emergency lane and no carpool lane, Intel DPDK technology would be the mastermind creating the perfect path for packages accessed by certain applications; Depending on their priority at a given time, they are organized and prioritized without using any special-purpose hardware. We’re all busy and in a hurry, but you’d still want your firefighters and ambulances to come through, right? So why not do it the smart way, without dedicated hardware?

At Wind River, we’ve integrated and optimized this technology into our Linux products and we also offer our expertise with Intel DPDK when developing on Wind River Linux. Our customers confirm the gain in performance, reporting up to a 30% boost. Additionally, we’ve even won industry accolades for our Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies that use Intel DPDK.

It’s been almost three years since Intel DPDK was introduced. In software years, that’s longer than 10 Russian novels. It has since grown, and it has made the world better since. We’re excited to keep up with the changes and help teams find success.