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5.3. DPDK HugePage configuration
DPDK makes heavy use of huge pages to eliminate pressure on the TLB. Therefore hugepages have to be configured in your system.
The dpdk package has a config file and scripts that try to ease hugepage configuration for DPDK in the form of /etc/dpdk/dpdk.conf. If you have more consumers of hugepages than just DPDK in your system or very special requirements how your hugepages are going to be set up you likely want to allocate/control them by yourself. If not this can be a great simplification to get DPDK configured for your needs.
Here an example configuring 1024 Hugepages of 2M each and 4 1G pages.
NR_2M_PAGES=1024 NR_1G_PAGES=4
As shown this supports configuring 2M and the larger 1G hugepages (or a mix of both). It will make sure there are proper hugetlbfs mountpoints for DPDK to find both sizes no matter what your default huge page size is. The config file itself holds more details on certain corner cases and a few hints if you want to allocate hugepages manually via a kernel parameter.
It depends on your needs which size you want - 1G pages are certainly more effective regarding TLB pressure. But there were reports of them fragmenting inside the DPDK memory alloactions. Also it can be harder to grab enough free space to set up a certain amount of 1G pages later in the lifecycle of a system.