If you want truly high-performance networking, you can bypass the kernel altogether with DPDK. So you don't have to worry about alternative kernels for other tasks at all. On the downside, DPDK takes over the NIC entirely, removing the kernel from the equation, so if you need the kernel to see network traffic for some reason, it won't work for you.
You can check out hardware support here: https://core.dpdk.org/supported/nics/
This was true a decade ago, with modern io_uring dpdk is probably an anti-pattern.
Interesting, it's been awhile since I looked at this stuff so I did a little searching and found this: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1789103/FULLTEXT...
Their conclusion is io_uring is still slower but not by much, and future improvements may make the difference negligible. So you're right, at least in part. Given the tradeoffs, DPDK may not be worth it anymore.
There are also just a bunch of operational hassles with using DPDK or SPDK. Your usual administrative commands don't work. Other operations aren't intermediated by the kernel -- instead you need 100% dedicated application devices. Device counters usually tracked by the kernel aren't. Etc. It can be fine, but if io_uring doesn't add too much overhead, it's a lot more convenient.
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Not by much?? You're exaggerating..
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I'm not sure that's true for a good chunk of the workloads that dpdk really shines on.
A lot of the benefit of dpdk is colocating your data and network stack in the same virtual memory context. io_uring I can see getting you there if you have you're serving fixed files as a cdn kind of like netflix's appliances, but for cases where you're actually doing branchy work on the individual requests, dpdk is probably a little easier to scale up to the faster network cards.