Close, but it really has nothing at all to do with the GPL. It has to do with reducing context switches (from userspace to kernelspace) and reducing hardware interrupts. When the name of the game is latency, context switches really hurt you. Batching is awful for latency, and great for throughput fyi.
In fact, openonload[1], and vma[1], 2 of the most common vendor provided kernel offload tools in use are both open source!
In fact, openonload[1], and vma[1], 2 of the most common vendor provided kernel offload tools in use are both open source!
[1] http://www.openonload.org/
[2] http://www.mellanox.com/page/software_vma?mtag=vma