From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32B61875 for ; Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:45:37 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.free-electrons.com (top.free-electrons.com [176.31.233.9]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F052D1F8AB for ; Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:45:35 +0000 (UTC) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 13:39:32 +0200 From: Thomas Petazzoni To: Christoph Lameter Message-ID: <20140616133932.7f8e6bbe@free-electrons.com> In-Reply-To: References: <20140611194504.GA2683@kroah.com> <20140613173041.GA19513@kroah.com> <1402682146.2224.44.camel@dabdike.int.hansenpartnership.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: James Bottomley , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Redesign Memory Management layer and more core subsystem List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , 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