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USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, General Track — Abstract
Pp. 223–236 of the Proceedings
A Portable Kernel Abstraction for Low-Overhead Ephemeral Mapping Management
Khaled Elmeleegy, Anupam Chanda, and Alan L. Cox, Rice University; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL
Abstract
Modern operating systems create ephemeral virtual-to-physical mappings
for a variety of purposes, ranging from the implementation of
interprocess communication to the implementation of process
tracing and debugging.
With succeeding generations of processors the cost of creating
ephemeral mappings is increasing, particularly when an
ephemeral mapping is shared by multiple processors.
To reduce the cost of ephemeral mapping management
within an operating system kernel, we introduce the sf_buf
ephemeral mapping interface.
We demonstrate how in several kernel subsystems—including pipes,
memory disks, sockets, execve(), ptrace(), and the vnode pager—the current implementation can be replaced by calls to the
sf_buf interface.
We describe the implementation of the sf_buf interface
on the 32-bit i386 architecture and the 64-bit amd64
architecture.
This implementation reduces the cost of ephemeral mapping management
by reusing wherever possible existing virtual-to-physical address mappings.
We evaluate the sf_buf interface for the pipe, memory disk and
networking subsystems.
Our results show that these subsystems perform significantly
better when using the sf_buf interface. On a multiprocessor
platform interprocessor interrupts are greatly reduced in number or eliminated
altogether.
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