[danceparty]

We are not struggling to do line rate 10G in the kernel. Modern 100Gbe nics (mellanox, solarflare) will happily do line rate with stock upstream kernel for a while now (definitely since 4.x) you only need to tune your irq balancing, and you can probably get away with not even doing that. If you are buying 100gbe nics you are also buying server class (xeon, rome) processors that can keep up.

Source: I operate a CDN with thousands of 100Gbe nics with a stock upstream LTS kernel, and minimal kernel tuning.

[ra1n85]

You're saying you can forward 100Gbps at line rate (148MPPS) through a stock kernel?

[danceparty]

You can get within a few percentage points, yes

I just tested this with two hosts with 4.14.127 upstream kernel and upstream mlx5 driver, and mellanox connectx-5 card. Using 16 iperf threads

[SUM] 0.0-10.0 sec 85.1 Gbits/sec

That's pretty close with no tuning, and well beyond 10gb/s we mentioned earlier