DPDK is the golden standard for high performance networking, but that performance comes at the cost of high memory consumption, high CPU utilization, and long start-up times. In this talk we introduce a highly efficient port of DPDK to Unikraft, a Linux Foundation open source project consisting of a micro-library operating system and build system that is able to seamlessly generate purpose-built KVM virtual machines. In this talk we will introduce Unikraft and the DPDK port, and show how these make a powerful combination towards building truly high performance, efficient and quick-to-boot virtual functions. In particular, we will show throughput numbers equivalent to Linux while consuming a fraction of the memory it uses, using a single CPU core as opposed to several ones, and significantly reducing boot times on multiple VMMs. Finally, we will show a brief demo of Unikraft in action.
