I am new to DPDK and I am implementing a DPDK-based application which might be running as a multi-process application. My understanding is that one of the processes should be the primary one, responsible for initializing and managing the hugepages. All the other processes should be secondary, meaning that they are connected to the primary process during DPDK initialization to get information about hugepages (please correct me if I am mistaken here). 

I am interested in the scenario where there are multiple DPDK processes, and the primary process dies. As far as I understand, existing secondary processes will continue running; however, I will not be able to start new DPDK processes: 

1) I cannot start a new primary process because it will try to initialize hugepages and this will fail since some of them are in use by existing secondary processes (source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74602244/dpdk-multi-process-kill-a-primary-process-and-restart-as-a-secondary-doesnt-wo) 

2) I cannot start a new secondary process because there is no primary process to connect to and get the hugepages info, so the secondary process won't be able to complete the initialization. 

Hence, if my primary process terminates, what should I do in order to start it again? 

I have come up with two possible solutions: 

1) If the primary process dies, I will have to kill all the secondary processes and restart everything. This solution is not ideal because I want to minimize the amount of time when processes are not running. 

2) Have a dummy primary process that does not contain any critical business logic and is solely responsible for DPDK initialization. Then, all the business-critical applications must be secondary processes. If one of them dies, I can simply restart it without interrupting other processes. This solution sounds better than the first, but it is still not perfect as it requires running an additional dummy process which I would prefer to avoid. 

Could anyone please advise me on the idiomatic way of dealing with these multiprocessing issues? 

Thank you in advance! 

Best regards, 

Mikhail Malofeev