alt Hacker NewsHaving networking, routing, VPN etc all not leave kernel space can be a performance improvement for some use cases.
Similarly, splitting the networking/etc stacks out from the kernel into userspace can also be a performance improvement for some use cases.
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stingraycharles • 08/01/2025
Yup, context switches between kernelspace and userspace are very expensive in high-performance situations, which is why these types of offloads are used.
At specific workloads (think: load balancers / proxy servers / etc), these things become extremely expensive.
Can't you say that about virtually anything? I'm sure having, say, MIDI synthesizers in the kernel would improve performance too, but not many think that is a good idea.