I'm not looking at the kernel source itself, but is this lying or am I reading it wrong?
> Packets transmitted on one device in the pair are immediately
received on the other device. When either device is down, the
link state of the pair is down.
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/veth.4.html
That sure makes it sound like veth transmissions at least on the same link are instantaneous and bypass the networking stack. I would imagine in a containerized environment it should be something like:
Pod 1 tries to send a packet to Pod 2, both on the same node but in different network namespaces with different IPs. Pod 1 sends its packet to the bridge connected to the other end of its veth pair and that should be instantaneous. Then the bridge sends across its other veth pair to pod 2's namespace, which is also instantaneous.
Is the problem with processing overhead at the bridge?