I'm interested in the http://seastar.io/ networking library that the Scylla guys built. Looks like it runs on DPDK and might be a nice way to do user mode networking. Anyone tried using it in other projects?
If you are thinking about starting a Seastar project, definitely check out SMF [0]. It's a highly optimized RPC framework that uses Seastar, and makes it easy to build high-performance servers and clients. Seastar itself is RPC agnostic, and this project has a great implementation of functionality most developers will eventually need.
I've also been interested in this project. Several years ago, I was toying with the idea of building a Kafka-compatible broker implementation with it. Although I didn't get very far, it's a very powerful and well-designed framework.