microsoft/demikernel

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1235 stars · 150 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Demikernel is a library operating system (LibOS) architecture from Microsoft Research for kernel-bypass I/O devices like DPDK and RDMA. It provides a uniform system call API across multiple LibOS implementations (catnap, catnip, catpowder) written in Rust.

Use cases

• build low-latency networking applications with DPDK
• use RDMA with a portable socket-like API
• experiment with kernel-bypass networking stacks
• write user-level TCP/IP networking for DPDK
• abstract over kernel sockets and kernel-bypass devices
• research high-performance datacenter networking

When to choose

• you need a uniform API across DPDK, RDMA, and raw socket backends
• you are doing systems research on kernel-bypass I/O
• you want a Rust user-level networking stack for DPDK

When to avoid

• you need production-grade stability - it is explicitly a prototype
• you need a general-purpose networking library with broad device support
• you want drop-in POSIX socket replacement with guarantees

Facets

library · maturity experimental

networking http-server concurrency operating-systems networking developer-tools microservices windows rust kernel-bypass libos dpdk rdma spdk xdp research-prototype linux

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