On the Design and Semantics of User-Space Communication Subsystems

The problem with Gbit/s networks is to get the hardware performance into the applications. The most promising technique is a zero-copy protocol combined with a user-space communication subsystem that (a) gives the application direct access to the network interface and (b) avoids all buuer-ing/copying. In this paper we examine the design space of user-space communication subsystems, especially how send and receive operations work and which communication semantics they imply. Furthermore , we propose a technique called page-exchange which avoids copy operations, is well deened, and has communication semantics equivalent to those of standard programming interfaces such as UNIX sockets, PVM, or MPI.