The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)

The DPDK is a set of software libraries to enable packet processing. It
consists of a set of polling mode drivers (PMD) which can be used to pull
network packets directly from a Network Interface Card (NIC), as well as
other libraries to assist in the processing of those packets. The additional
libraries include ones for:
* memory and buffer management
* packet classification
* software rings or FIFOs to allow packet transfer between cores
amongst others.

Applications written using the DPDK run in userspace. The devices used by a
DPDK application are removed from kernel control and are instead managed
directly by that application.

WWW: http://dpdk.org/