Building a 5G UPF That Hits 9 Gbps on Commodity x86

A developer built a 5G User Plane Function using VPP and DPDK that saturates a 10G link at 8.5-9 Gbps, up from 850 Mbps with socket-based forwarding. The design removes the kernel from the packet path using DPDK's poll-mode drivers and VPP's graph-node architecture. Integration with Open5GS SMF via PFCP enables full line-rate packet processing on standard x86 hardware without FPGAs or SmartNICs.