SOSP '87 Proceedings of the eleventh ACM Symposium on Operating systems principles
Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols
SIGCOMM '90 Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Communications architectures & protocols
Designing file systems for digital video and audio
SOSP '91 Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems - Special issue on high speed networks
The importance of non-data touching processing overheads in TCP/IP
SIGCOMM '93 Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
Fbufs: a high-bandwidth cross-domain transfer facility
SOSP '93 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Fast Interrupt Priority Management in Operating System Kernels
USENIX Microkernels and Other Kernel Architectures Symposium
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High-performance networking requires attention to operating system support at the device driver level. Existing driver models, such as those of Unix, are not necessarily well-suited to supporting high-speed network interfaces. In fact, current drivers may represent a significant obstacle between applications and the high-speed network adapters they seek to exploit. Yet existing models cannot simply be discarded. Certain trends in RISC processor design can also tend to make existing device driver implementations less efficient. Specifically, many drivers make extensive use of operations which are becoming relatively more costly as RISC architectures evolve. This paper describes an effort currently underway to develop device drivers specifically designed to support high-speed network interfaces on RISC architectures. We have analyzed the operation of some existing commercial device driver implementations and modified one using several techniques. Taken together, these techniques promise to produce network device drivers which deliver the high level of performance demanded by today's high speed networks.