Giving applications access to Gb/s networking

Operating systems (OSs) used in high-speed networks must reduce copying to deliver maximal throughput to applications and must deliver this throughput while preserving the capability of the host to perform applications processing. One way to reduce copying by enabling data transfers directly to and from buffers located in application-process address spaces is presented. The method has been demonstrated experimentally and is shown to deliver high throughputs. OS support must also include scheduling, which allows bandwidth-allocated traffic streams to be delivered. The implementation described provides resource scheduling for network users, and considerably reduces interrupt overhead.>