Device Driver Software and Low-Level APIs

To facilitate secure, transparent, user-level access to the distributed shared memory (DSM) of the SCI hardware, a variety of setup and resource management tasks have to be performed. As for other I/O devices, such tasks are carried out by the operating system, via the SCI device driver code. Whereas communication over SCI is lightweight and efficient, the management tasks enabling this are considerably more complex than those required, e.g., for a mainstream network, as pointed out in Chapter 9.