Dpdk

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open-source set of libraries and poll-mode drivers (PMDs) that move packet processing from the kernel to userspace, enabling telco and cloud applications to achieve millions of packets per second per core with predictable latency. DPDK bypasses the traditional socket stack: applications busy-poll NIC queues (or virtio/vhost rings), use hugepages to reduce TLB misses, and pin threads to NUMA-local cores — a model suited to UPF, vRouter, CG-NAT, load balancers, and 5G user-plane functions where per-packet syscall overhead is unacceptable.