DPDK architecture — PMDs, mempools, rings, hugepages

The Five Building Blocks

Every DPDK application is built from five core primitives. Poll Mode Drivers (PMDs) are user-space NIC drivers that bypass the kernel — they map NIC registers and DMA rings into the application's address space and the application polls these directly. Hugepage memory provides 2 MB or 1 GB page-mapped memory for packet buffers; this dramatically reduces TLB pressure compared to standard 4 KB pages. Memory pools (rte_mempool) pre-allocate fixed-size packet buffers (mbufs) for zero-allocation packet handling. Rings (rte_ring) are lock-free FIFOs used to pass packet pointers between worker…