Operating system support for high-speed communication
Peter Druschel · Communications of the ACM · 1996
This article looks at the I/O bottleneck in operating systems, with particular focus on high-speed networking. We start by identifying the causes of this bottleneck, which are rooted in a mismatch of operating system behaviors with the performance characteristics of modern computer hardware. Then traditional approaches to supporting I/O in operating systems are reevaluated in light of current hardware performance tradeoffs. This reevaluation gives rise to a set of novel techniques that eliminate the I/O bottleneck