AF_XDP is an address family that is optimized for high performance packet processing. AF_XDP sockets enable the possibility for XDP program to redirect packets to a memory buffer in userspace.
For the full details behind AF_XDP socket, you can refer to AF_XDP documentation in the Kernel.
This Linux-specific PMD driver creates the AF_XDP socket and binds it to a specific netdev queue, it allows a DPDK application to send and receive raw packets through the socket which would bypass the kernel network stack. Current implementation only supports single queue, multi-queues feature will be added later.
Note that MTU of AF_XDP PMD is limited due to XDP lacks support for fragmentation.
AF_XDP PMD enables need_wakeup flag by default if it is supported. This need_wakeup feature is used to support executing application and driver on the same core efficiently. This feature not only has a large positive performance impact for the one core case, but also does not degrade 2 core performance and actually improves it for Tx heavy workloads.
The following options can be provided to set up an af_xdp port in DPDK.
This is a Linux-specific PMD, thus the following prerequisites apply:
The following example will set up an af_xdp interface in DPDK:
--vdev net_af_xdp,iface=ens786f1