A detailed methodology for achieving deterministic, latency-stable dataplane performance for DPDK workloads on bare-metal Red Hat OpenShift. The approach covers end-to-end stack tuning from BIOS to pod level, including SR-IOV with VFIO for userspace I/O, CPU isolation via Performance Profile Operator, and TRex as a
Table of contents
Overview of the evaluationWhy determinism matters more than peak throughputHardware specificationsSoftware and tooling specificationsSystem tuning: Engineer a low-noise platformNetwork topologyKernel and host tuning via performance profileOwning the dataplane with SR-IOV and VFIOPod-level optimizationsTraffic generation strategy: Separate load from measurementTRex: Deterministic traffic as an applianceBinary search: Enforce stability by designConverged operating pointWhy the results are credibleHardware context and future researchWrap upSort: