I am warming up to netmap but I want to deploy on Linux without distributing a kernel module.
Snabb Switch still uses its own built-in device drivers but if that was not an option I reckon we would be more likely to adopt netmap than DPDK because it is so much simpler.
From: Daniel Borkmann
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With 1 core netmap does 10G line-rate on 64b; I don't
know their numbers on 40G when run on decent hardware though.
So looks like netmap has not only nice API, driver-specific code is trivial, but also the performance might be good. If only netmap could do the "bifurcated driver" use case!
Snabb Switch still uses its own built-in device drivers but if that was not an option I reckon we would be more likely to adopt netmap than DPDK because it is so much simpler.