Container shipping: operating system support for I/O-intensive applications

New I/O devices with data rates ranging from 10 to 100 Mbytes per second are becoming available for personal computers and workstations. Along with continual improvements in processor, memory, and bus technology, these devices have enabled I/O-intensive applications for desktop computing that require input, processing, and output of very large amounts of data. We focus on an important aspect of operating system support for these applications: efficient transfer of large data objects between the protection domains in which processes and devices reside. A rapidly growing class of I/O-intensive applications is multimedia computing. After we present an I/O-pipeline model, we analyze issues relevant to the design of an operating system inter-domain data-transfer facility. Then we present the design for such a facility. An I/O pipeline is a model of a dynamic computation structure consisting of a sequence of domains: an input domain followed by one or more intermediate domains, and an output domain.<
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