eRPC VS protobuf

The most common example is DPDK [1]. It's a framework for building bespoke networking stacks that are usable from userspace, without involving the kernel.

You'll find DPDK mentioned a lot in the networking/HPC/data center literature. An example of a backend framework that uses DPDK is the seastar framework [2]. Also, I recently stumbled upon a paper for efficient RPC networks in data centers [3].

If you want to learn more, the p99 conference by ScyllaDB has tons of speakers talking about some interesting challenges.

[1] https://www.dpdk.org/.

[2] https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

[3] https://github.com/erpc-io/eRPC

My side project has been to rewrite https://github.com/erpc-io/eRPC which does RPCs over UDP with some congestion control supposedly quite fast. Paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi19-kalia.pdf. I never got the code to work in AWS; I believe the author focused on Mellanox NICS but that's not really commodity H/W, which is where my interests lay.

So I dug into it .. and well I'll have my own library soon. I should be able to send UDP w/o congestion control sometime this week.

eRPC uses DPDK (100% user space NIC TX/RX control) plus the author's own other ideas to get performance. Since I'm getting into NICs + DPDK (in a serious way i.e this much more involved than vanilla sys/socket.h I/O) way, way late in the game, I hope and believe DPDK is, in the medium term, the better way to go than to turn to kernel improvements in for I/O.

Like others, getting the kernel out of the way, with pinned threads seems cleaner if one can develop from scratch.

This library will be a part of something bigger, however, a key architecture point for many people is: I got a RPC/packet/message. Now should I:

* process it in-place e.g. on the thread that was doing RX?

* delegate it to another core?

* if I delegate .. to whom?

* If I delegate how do I get a response back?

In DPDK I believe these are easier to decide and well-manage in code.

=> ERROR [11/14] RUN curl -OL "https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases/download/v3.0.0/protoc-3.0.0-linux-x86_64.zip" && 1.6s

# Make sure you grab the latest version curl -OL https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases/download/v3.5.1/protoc-3.5.1-linux-x86_64.zip # Unzip unzip protoc-3.5.1-linux-x86_64.zip -d protoc3 # Move protoc to /usr/local/bin/ sudo mv protoc3/bin/* /usr/local/bin/ # Move protoc3/include to /usr/local/include/ sudo mv protoc3/include/* /usr/local/include/ # Optional: change owner sudo chown [user] /usr/local/bin/protoc sudo chown -R [user] /usr/local/include/google