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  • Hacker News
  • ooh no more DPDK, this will make it a lot easier. I just started working with trex but it's all really complicated. Going to give this a try
    by barryvand
  • I think, and I'm saying this in part to get someone to correct me, that post-XDP (so 5 years or so now) DPDK is basically obsolete. Is there a circumstance where it would make sense to start from DPDK rather than XDP?
    by tptacek
  • The video demo is pretty neat as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EmxvaOR5uA
    by bgpdude
  • That’s very interesting, thank you for sharing. Looks like it could be a very useful tool for testing high performance networking.

    I wonder if something similar could be done using TC BPF instead of AF_XDP? My only reservation about AF XDP is that it requires a special NIC to support it, so it may not be useful for a “regular Joe” user. I wonder if TC BPF would also work since it similarly bypasses the Kernel networking stack, I believe you can put packets directly into the NIC TX queue for transmission

    by spaceywilly
  • you can use generic af_xdp which sits at the TC layer. Just get a bit less performance.
    by bgpdude
  • it seems like every NIC on the market that can do 100Gb has support in its linux kernel driver, so probably not a big deal in practice
    by Palomides
  • You can, but the interesting thing about AF_XDP is that you've got a userland path to writing directly to the card's DMA buffers; TC BPF still allocates an skbuff for every packet you send.
    by tptacek
  • As someone who has worked in the Telco/NFV industry for well over 10 years now, I can confidently say this is a breath of fresh air. Don’t get me wrong, DPDK-based tools are great, but setting up Cisco TRex or even basic TestPMD requires a lot of specialized knowledge. Indeed, in the era of LLMs, the barrier to entry is much lower, but hardware requirements remain regardless of whether an AI agent handles the implementation for you. For anybody looking for XDP-supported drivers/NICs -> https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/docs/kernel-versi...
    by m4r1k
  • https://toonk.io/wireblast-building-a-line-rate-packet-gener...
    by mjevans
  • Ah thanks!!
    by bgpdude