Can a DPDK instance be shared between 2 linux apps in different containers?

Question

I'm afraid I'm not a DPDK expert, and know even less about containers. So apologies if this is a silly question; just trying to find out whether something is possible before spending a lot of time learning enough to work out that it isn't.

We have 2 apps which communicate with each other. Before we moved to containers, they used a single DPDK instance for that communication - one app was the primary DPDK process which created some DPDK structures with well defined names, and the other app was a secondary DPDK process which searched for and (hopefully) found those named structures. Messages were passed from app to app through the shared structures.

But can we still do that if the apps are running in different containers?

Answer 1

Within the same container rte_mp_* API will work between Primary and Secondaries. But if it is 2 different containers Primary-Secondaries via rte_mp_* will not work as these are separate process under a different namespace.

Your next best bet is simply to create the message and use Linux socket to push to other containers. In general rte_mp_* only works between primary and secondaries under the same container.

Answer 2

One way to make a primary and a secondary process work in two separate containers would be to run the two containers within the same pod in case of using Kubernetes