I have limited hands-on experience with both but they don't serve the same purpose/have the same implementation. You use SRIOV to allow Tenants to access the NIC cards directly and bypass any inherent linux-vr/OVS performance limitations. This is key for NFV workloads which are expecting large amount of PPS + low latency (because they are often just virtualized bare-metal products with one real cloud-readiness/architecture ;) ) - This means that a Tenant with an SRIOV port can use DPDK + access the NIC through the VF which means (in theory) a better performance than OVS+DPDK.

You use ovs-dpdk to increase the performance of OVS based flows (so provider networks + vxlan based internal-tenant networks).

On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 11:13 AM Satish Patel <satish.txt@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks. Just curious then why people directly go for SR-IOV
implementation where they get better performance + they can use the
same CPU more also. What are the measure advantages or features
attracting the community to go with DPDK over SR-IOV?

On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 10:50 AM Laurent Dumont <laurentfdumont@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As far as I know, DPDK enabled cores will show 100% usage at all times.
>
> On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 9:39 AM Satish Patel <satish.txt@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Folks,
>>
>> Recently i have added come compute nodes in cloud supporting
>> openvswitch-dpdk for performance. I am seeing all my PMD cpu cores are
>> 100% cpu usage on linux top command. It is normal behavior from first
>> looks. It's very scary to see 400% cpu usage on top. Can someone
>> confirm before I assume it's normal and what we can do to reduce it if
>> it's too high?
>>