Re: [Question] Explanation of zero-copy networking

[Reto Baettig <baettig@scs.ch>]

> considered to be in the "window of scarcity" (today we have 100MBit
> Ethernets and 133++MB/s PCI). Tomorrow our operating system concepts
> have to cope with 1, 10, ?? Gigabit Ethernets, Infiniband ,
> ... who knows.

We had to write our own RPC mechanism because with the standard-stacks
we had no chance of achieving our goals. We would have loved to use
tcp/ip but it was not possible with Linux 2.2. 
Today we achieve almost 200MB/s over our RPC stack and this with the
CPU's almost idle. With TCP/IP and Gig-E we only came up to 60-70MB/s
and then the system was completely busy and unresponsive (Linux 2.4 is
supposed to be better but I doubt that we get a CPU load this low
without zerocopy networking).

We would like to look at the zerocopy ideas of Linux 2.4 and try to
implement our RPC mechanism over zerocopy-TCP (if something like this
exists). We just started with this idea and don't know exactly where to
start yet (we are looking for something like a de-facto zerocopy
standard for sockets)... Any ideas are welcome.

	Reto