emmericp/ixy

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1310 stars · 139 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

ixy is a userspace packet processing framework and network driver for Intel 10 Gbit/s NICs (82599/ixgbe family) and virtio, written from scratch in ~1000 lines of C. It is designed for educational purposes, letting users read the entire driver from startup to DMA descriptor handling without kernel modules or external libraries.

Use cases

• learn how a network card driver works at the lowest level
• forward packets at line rate in userspace without kernel modules
• build a custom packet generator for 10 Gbit/s NICs
• experiment with high-performance packet processing without DPDK's complexity
• study DMA descriptor handling with a readable codebase
• teach networking systems courses with a minimal driver implementation

When to choose

• you want to understand or teach how NIC drivers work end-to-end
• you need a simple, dependency-free userspace driver for Intel 82599/X520 or virtio NICs
• you need very high packet forwarding rates (>25 Mpps per core) with minimal code
• you prefer a small readable codebase over DPDK's large feature set

When to avoid

• you need production-grade support for many NIC families, features, and protocols
• you require a mature, actively maintained driver for deployment
• your NIC is not in the Intel ixgbe/82599 family or virtio
• you need kernel-integrated features like XDP/eBPF or broad ecosystem tooling

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

networking developer-tools networking developer-tools operating-systems performance c cli userspace-network-driver dpdk-alternative packet-processing ixgbe educational high-performance-networking virtio linux

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