USENIX Association Proceedings of the General Track: 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Boston, MA, USA June 27–July 2, 2004 © 2004 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email:
[email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. Making the “Box” Transparent: System Call Performance as a First-class Result Yaoping Ruan and Vivek Pai Department of Computer Science Princeton University {yruan,vivek}@cs.princeton.edu Abstract and other networked systems, using kernel integration to For operating system intensive applications, the ability of avoid performance problems becomes unrealistic. As a re- designers to understand system call performance behavior sult, examining the interaction between operating systems is essential to achieving high performance. Conventional and user processes remains a useful area of investigation. performance tools, such as monitoring tools and profilers, Much of the earlier work focusing on the kernel-user in- collect and present their information off-line or via out-of- terface centered around developing new system calls that band channels. We believe that making this information are more closely tailored to the needs of particular appli- first-class and exposing it to applications via in-band chan- cations. In particular, zero-copy I/O [17, 31] and scal- nels on a per-call basis presents opportunities for perfor- able event delivery [9, 10, 23] are examples of techniques mance analysis and tuning not available via other mecha- that have been adopted in mainstream operating systems, nisms.