KDkd913·Sep 27, 2025
There is AMD's onload https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload. It works with Solarflare, Xilinx but also generic NIC support via AF_XDP.
In Fast UDP I/O for Firefox in RustXilinx-CNS
onload
C2021–2025
Xilinx-CNS / onload
onload
OpenOnload high performance user-level network stack
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
852GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
OpenOnload high performance user-level network stack
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-08-12 00:10:26 UTC to 2025-09-27 13:19:39 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesWhat is being asked for already exists? It is called Onload.
https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload
In The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019)I've never used dpdk for kernel bypass, only open onload. Originally for solarflare hardware, apparently it works with cards from other vendors via XDP (though I've never tried it). It gets loaded via LD_PRELOAD and replaces ordinary BSD socket functions with full userspace sockets that can fall back to the kernel when necessary (e.g. if the application wants to yield the cpu but still get notified about the socket).
https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload
In How I learned to stop worrying and love userspace networkingHFT is relative. But here's one thing that is actually used in many firms: https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload (and correspondingly these network cards: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/x3.htm...)
In Ask HN: I am interested in reading about techniques HFT firms useYet another academic work in the OS space that should have been tested against the the state of the art in (commercially backed) networking space.
From the abstract:
> However, none of these systems offer a general-purpose datapath OS replacement that meet the needs of µs-scale systems
One of the key points that the authors use to motivate their work is that using kernel bypass technologies is hard because it requires software engineers to rearchitect their code.
Call me sceptical of that claim. I can think of 3 (open source) systems that provide drop-in replacement network interfaces for existing software, but offer nanosecond (not microsecond!) scale performance.
- Solarflare/Xilinx Open Onload - https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload
- Exablaze/Cisco - ExaSOCK - https://github.com/cisco/exanic-software
- Melanox/NVidia VMA - https://git
Read the rest
hub.com/Mellanox/libvma
With each of the above systems, they are designed to offer low latency network stack replacement for existing applications, without code modification or even recompilation. Exactly the authors’ goals.
But there is not a single reference to any of these technologies in the paper. And crucially no comparison to any of them in the evaluation.
The authors seem blissfully unaware of what work has actually been done to solve these problems. Which makes the contributions of the paper … somewhat dubious.
How about the x2 or Alveo series from Xilinx? It is basically the original definer of smartnic.
It comes from solarflare who have a long pedigree of low-latency smartnics. They used to supply Cloudflare, and also supply like 50% of fintechs/financial markets.
You can also just use openonload to accelerate your programs. In this case just doing straight linux socket programming, which can be accelerated without dpdk. Or just use the open source linux net driver if necessary.
https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload
In Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance