Efficient kernel support for reliable communication
Robert D. Russell, Philip J. Hatcher · 1998
This paper presents the implementation of a system called Net* that provides a parallel programming environment running on a group of personal computers interconnected via a dedicated local area network. Net* is designed to run on hardware consisting entirely of inexpensive "off-the-shelf" components, including a number of popular networking technologies. Its implementation depends on a number of operating system modifications to reduce overhead of network I/O, and a lightweight protocol design that utilizes these modifications to provide high-speed, reliable, in-order message streams on a local area network. Unlike other recent work, in our implementation protocol processing is kept in the kernel in order to provide security and efficiency on today 's commercially available network adaptors. I/O directly to/from buffers mapped into both user and kernel space eliminates copying and reduces the need for explicit system calls. Preliminary measurements indicate low per-message latency is ...