DPDK doesn't inherently do much in the way of power management.
I agree - it doesn't. That's not what it was made for.
Note that DPDK applications are usually intended to run in very-high
data rate environments where no gains are likely to be realized by
avoiding a busy-wait loop.
That's not what research shows.
Use of LPI states is proposed for power management under high data rate conditions in [5] and
in [6], use of the low-power instruction halt is investigated and found to save power under such conditions.
Cheers,
Etienne
[3] X. Li, W. Cheng, T. Zhang, F. Ren, and B. Yang, “Towards Power Efficient High Performance Packet I/O,”
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 981–996, April 2020,
ISSN:1558-2183. DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2019.2957746
[5] R. Bolla, R. Bruschi, F. Davoli, and J. F. Pajo, “A Model-Based Approach Towards Real-Time Analytics in NFV Infrastructures,”
IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 529–541, Jun. 2020, ISSN: 2473-2400.
DOI: 10.1109/TGCN.2019.2961192.