Jaguar: enabling efficient communication and I/O in Java

Implementing efficient communication and I/O mechanisms in Java requires both fast access to low-level system resources (such as network and raw disk interfaces) and direct manipulation of memory regions external to the Java heap (such as communication and I/O buffers). Java native methods are too expensive to perform these operations and raise serious protection concerns. We present Jaguar, a new mechanism that provides Java applications with efficient access to system resources while retaining the protection of the Java environment. This is accomplished through compile-time translation of certain Java bytecodes to inlined machine code segments. We demonstrate the use of Jaguar through a Java interface to the VIA fast communications layer, which achieves nearly identical performance to that of C, and Pre-Serialized Objects, a mechanism which greatly reduces the cost of Java object serialization.