Intel Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 Support For Linux Inches Closer To Mainline

Back in September I wrote about Intel developers posting Linux enablement patches for their Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 PCIe accelerator for hardware-based load balancing functionality. That work hasn't yet been upstreamed but recently marked its tenth revision to the "DLB 2.0" patches.

The Intel Dynamic Load Balancer is a PCIe accelerator designed for use with their Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Event Device Library and provides load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication. Intel DLB aims to provide greater performance than software-based load balancing and the current generation Dynamic Load Balancer is found within the Atom P series for performance / latency optimizations for edge computing workloads. Public information still appears limited but Intel describes the current DLB simply as "Intel Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel DLB) improves performance and reduces latency by dynamically and efficiently distributing processing across up to 24 CPU cores."

Intel has been working on their DLB Linux driver with a focus on DLB 2.0. In the months since the initial code patches, the code has continued to be revised and addressing various technical issues raised by the upstream code review process.

If Intel's Dynamic Load Balancer is of interest to you, learn more via this patch series.