DPDK mode¶

Topic: Planning and setup

Learn: How to select networking hardware for ScyllaDB

Audience: ScyllaDB administrators

ScyllaDB is designed to use the Seastar framework, which uses the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to drive NIC hardware directly, instead of relying on the kernel’s network stack. This provides an enormous performance boost for ScyllaDB. ScyllaDB and DPDK also rely on the Linux “hugepages” feature to minimize overhead on memory allocations. DPDK is supported on a variety of high-performance network devices.

ScyllaDB RPM packages are built with DPDK support, but the package defaults to POSIX networking mode (see Administration Guide). To enable DPDK, edit /etc/sysconfig/scylla-server and edit the following lines:

# choose following mode: virtio, dpdk, posix
NETWORK_MODE=posix

# Ethernet device driver (dpdk)
ETHDRV=