Important cli arguments

Coremask or -list

By default DPDK runs with all detected processor cores enabled. This is may well suffice for simple testing or more complex applications which have their own CPU affinity logic, but for other setups it is often desireable to limit DPDK to specific CPUs. This can done with either a bitmask with the -c option or the more human-friendly -l option to list the cores by numbers. Cores are numbered starting from zero.

For example to enable cores 1 and 3 you could use either -l 1,3 or -c 0xA

Memory usage

DPDK likes to hog all the hugepages it can get, which often is not the behavior you want - for example one might want to reserve some 1G hugepages for virtual machines. Use --socket-mem (or -m) option to limit the amount of memory DPDK allocates on startup.