[dpdk-dev] Beyond DPDK 2.0

[Luke Gorrie]

Hi Tim,

On 16 April 2015 at 12:38, O'Driscoll, Tim <tim.o'driscoll at intel.com> wrote:

> Following the launch of DPDK by Intel as an internal development project,
> the launch of dpdk.org by 6WIND in 2013, and the first DPDK RPM packages
> for Fedora in 2014, 6WIND, Red Hat and Intel would like to prepare for
> future releases after DPDK 2.0 by starting a discussion on its evolution.
> Anyone is welcome to join this initiative.
>

Thank you for the open invitation.

I have a couple of questions about the long term of DPDK:

1. How will DPDK manage overlap with other project over time?

In some ways DPDK is growing more overlap with other projects e.g.
forking/rewriting functionality from Linux (e.g. ixgbe), FreeBSD (e.g.
Broadcom PMD), GLIBC (e.g. memcpy).

In other ways DPDK is delegating functionality to external systems instead
e.g. the bifurcated driver (delegate to kernel) and Mellanox PMD (delegate
to vendor shared library).

How is this going to play out over the long term? And is there an
existential risk that it will end up being easier to port the good bits of
DPDK into the kernel than the rest of the good bits of the kernel into DPDK?

2. How will DPDK users justify contributing to DPDK upstream?

Engineers in network equipment vendors want to contribute to open source,
but what is the incentive for the companies to support this? This would be
easy if DPDK were GPL'd (they are compelled) or if everybody were
dynamically linking with the upstream libdpdk (can't have private patches).
However, in a world where DPDK is BSD-licensed and statically linked, is it
not both cheaper and competitively advantageous to keep fixes and
optimizations in house?

Today the community is benefiting immensely from the contributions of
companies like 6WIND and Brocade, but I wonder if this going to be the
exception or the rule.

That's all from me. Thanks for listening :-).

Cheers,
-Luke