[escardin]

No you still have to send the data over the pcie link, but DPDK should basically offload all the network work to the nic, so that you are just streaming data to it. The kernel won't need to deal with IRQs or timing or anything like that.

I might be making things up, but I believe you can also run code on DPDK nics? i.e. beyond straight networking offload. If that's the case you could try compressing the data before you DMA it to the nic. This would make no sense normally, but if your bottleneck is in fact the pcie x1 link and you want to saturate the network, it would be something worth trying.

I mean really the whole thing is at most a fun exercise as the nic costs more than the pi.

[geerlingguy]

Could be the first pi to mine crypto on a NIC. 30 years later...