taking first steps with XDP

taking first steps with XDP

[David Gohberg]

Hello everyone,

My goal is to build a simple program that schedules sending an
heartbeat packet (sort of like an ICMP reply-response) to a list of IP
addresses (a few million of them) on regular intervals, and update
alive/dead software state for each address. I have a pcap
implementation but performance is subpar.

I understand that for the rx part, a simple xdp program that
intercepts the heartbeat reply and writes to some bpf map will be
sufficient. However, from what I read, in order to send packets in the
same path, I will need to use AF_XDP sockets and write a user-space
application that will have to deal with cpu cores, rings, queues,
umems and everything related. Since I don't really need to redirect
the heartbeat reply packet to user-space, just acknowledge that a
reply was received (that can happen in the XDP program) is there a
layer or library over AF_XDP that allows for a simpler tx API which
abstracts the underlying mechanisms I mentioned?