Re: [RFC] Direct Sockets Support??

[Alan Cox]

> With the advent of VI and Infiniband, there is a growing need to support =
> Sockets over such new technologies. I studied recent performance =
> analysis of sockets vs direct sockets and found that there is a 250% =
> performance hike and 30% decrease in latency time. Also CPU bandwidth is =
> significantly reduced.=20

Define 'direct sockets' firstly.

I have seen several lines of attack on very high bandwidth devices. Firstly
the linux projects a while ago doing usermode message passing directly over
network cards for ultra low latency. Secondly there was a VI based project
that was mostly driven from userspace.

One thing that remains unresolved is the question as to whether the very low
cost Linux syscalls and zero copy are enough to achieve this using a
conventional socket API and the kernel space, or whether a hybrid direct 
access setup is actually needed.