AF_XDP — kernel-bypass without DPDK's complexity

AF_XDP — The Best of Both Worlds (Almost)

AF_XDP is a Linux socket family added in kernel 4.18+ that delivers packets directly from the NIC driver to user-space ring buffers, similar to DPDK's zero-copy receive — but without DPDK's full kernel-bypass philosophy. The kernel driver still owns the NIC. Standard Linux tools like tcpdump and iproute2 still see the interface. But selected traffic (matched by an XDP program with XDP_REDIRECT to a socket map) is delivered directly to user space with zero copies. The result is performance approaching DPDK (within 10-30% on modern NICs) with significantly simpler operational model — no NIC…