Efficient Memory-Mapped I/O Access for BMC Applications
Baoyang Liu, Chaofan Chen, Huang Jh · 2025
The efficient operation and management of data centers serve as the backbone for the rapid growth of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry. Within this context, the Input/Output (I/O) access of the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) plays a pivotal role. For Linux-based BMC systems, conventional I/O access methods often incur significant system call overheads, thereby hindering the performance of BMC applications. In this paper, we concentrate on the bottlenecks that hinder I/O access and introduce an improved conventional I/O access method (ICIOAM). This approach effectively streamlines the system call overheads inherent in the traditional I/O access method. Furthermore, to further elevate I/O access performance, we introduce an innovative physical memory's address mapping-based I/O access method (PMAM-IOAM). This novel approach bypasses the existing I/O access mechanisms of the Linux kernel and executes I/O operations directly on the memory-mapped address space. Experimental evaluations and comprehensive analysis of ICIOAM and PMAM-IOAM confirm that, for typical BMC applications, these two methods offer a significant performance boost. Specifically, they achieve I/O access speeds that are approximately and 18 times faster than the conventional I/O access method, respectively.