ASHs

Deborah A. Wallach, Dawson R. Engler, M. Frans Kaashoek
1996 Conference proceedings on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications - SIGCOMM '96  
Application-specific safe message handlers (ASHs) are designed to provide applications with hardware-level network performance. ASHs are user-written code fragments that safely and efficiently execute in the kernel in response to message arrival. ASHs can direct message transfers (thereby eliminating copies) and send messages (thereby reducing send-response latency). In addition, the ASH system provides support for dynamic integrated layer processing (thereby eliminating duplicate message
more » ... sals) and dynamic protocol composition (thereby supporting modularity). ASHs provide this high degree of flexibility while still providing network performance as good as, or (if they exploit application-specific knowledge) even better than, hard-wired in-kernel implementations. A combination of user-level microbenchmarks and end-to-end system measurements using TCP demonstrate the benefits of the ASH system.
doi:10.1145/248156.248161 dblp:conf/sigcomm/WallachEK96 fatcat:qqhsud34c5c5zfdyuy3xjzobbq