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authorAlex Williams <alex.williams@ni.com>2019-01-29 14:53:07 -0800
committerBrent Stapleton <brent.stapleton@ettus.com>2019-01-29 15:22:42 -0800
commitda59fe8f3511befe178bb96adcdad332e2a5d08e (patch)
treebd8733dbc2a8303896607e9d6ccb0a18c38433fb
parent95bdaa00cc8c9545f5a2f90a9939fe359fb401bf (diff)
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docs: Add information about what dpdk_zero_copy is doing
This adds some info about what is happening in the dpdk_zero_copy transport, especially the fact that there are threads spun off that take over CPUs.
-rw-r--r--host/docs/dpdk.dox11
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/host/docs/dpdk.dox b/host/docs/dpdk.dox
index 9359a22cd..564cfeaf6 100644
--- a/host/docs/dpdk.dox
+++ b/host/docs/dpdk.dox
@@ -6,8 +6,15 @@
Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is a set of libraries that allows network
interface controller (NIC) drivers to use user space memory buffers to send and
-receive data over a network. This allows us to eliminate context switching in
-UHD's transport layer, which enables us to stream higher sample rates.
+receive data over a network. These libraries underpin one of the network
+transport options in UHD.
+
+In UHD, the DPDK-based transport will fork off I/O threads that implement the
+network services, and these I/O threads will service the NICs on cores provided
+in your configuration. The cores will be completely consumed by the I/O thread.
+Together with DPDK's polling-mode drivers, this virtually eliminates context
+switching in UHD's transport layer, which enables us to stream higher sample
+rates.
\section dpdk_setup DPDK Setup