Seastar and DPDK
================

Seastar uses the Data Plane Development Kit to drive NIC hardware directly.  This
provides an enormous performance boost.

To enable DPDK, specify `--enable-dpdk` to `./configure.py`, and `--dpdk-pmd` as a
run-time parameter.  This will use the DPDK package provided as a git submodule with the
seastar sources.

Please note, if `--enable-dpdk` is used to build DPDK on an aarch64 machine, you need to
specify [target architecture](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/AArch64-Options.html) with optional
[feature modifiers](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/AArch64-Options.html#aarch64-feature-modifiers)
with the `--cflags` option as well, like:
```console
$ ./configure.py --mode debug --enable-dpdk --cflags='-march=armv8-a+crc+crypto'
```

To use your own self-compiled DPDK package, follow this procedure:

1. Setup host to compile DPDK:
   - Ubuntu 
     `sudo apt-get install -y build-essential linux-image-extra-$(uname -r)` 
2. Prepare a DPDK SDK:
   - Download the latest DPDK release: `wget https://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-23.07.tar.xz`
   - Untar it.
   - Follow the [Quick Start Guide](https://core.dpdk.org/doc/quick-start/)
   - Pass `-Dmbuf_refcnt_atomic=false` to meson.
3. Modify the CMake cache (`CMakeCache.txt`) to inform CMake of the location of the installed DPDK SDK.