Adopting system call based address translation into user-level communication

Abstract

User-level communication alleviates the software overhead of the communication subsystem by allowing applications to access the network interface directly. For that purpose, efficient address translation of virtual address to physical address is critical. In this study, we propose a system call based address translation scheme where every translation is done by the kernel instead of a translation cache on a network interface controller as in the previous cache based address translation. According to our experiments, our scheme achieves up to 4.5 % reduction in application execution time compared to the previous cache based approach.