Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Redesign Memory Management layer and more core subsystem

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Christoph Lameter,

On Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:41:12 -0500 (CDT), Christoph Lameter wrote:

> > The point here is that lots of people say "just get your operating
> > system out of my way" most realise they actually didn't mean it when
> > presented with the reality.
> 
> Right. Exactly. What I would like to see is the OS doing its part to make
> things nice and provide a convenient abstraction of the ugly details.
> 
> > The abstractions most people who say this want are a zero delay data
> > path with someone else taking care of all of the metadata and setup
> > problems ... effectively a MPI type interface.  Is that what you're
> > looking for, Christoph?
> 
> Ideally the setup/metadata should be handled by the OS while the data
> path would go direct. The get-out-of-the-way piece is restricted only to
> the performance critical portion which is the actual data transfer.

I might be completely out of topic here, but this very much sounds like
what is happening for graphics. There is a DRM/KMS kernel side, which
does all the mode setting, context allocation and things like that, and
then all the rest takes place in userspace, using hardware-specific
pieces of code in libdrm and other components of the graphics stack.

If we translate that to networking, there would be a need to have all
of the setup/initialization done in the kernel, and then some
hardware-specific userspace libraries to use for the data path.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com