GIT-CERCS-04-08
Di-Shi Sun, Douglas M. Blough,
Shared Address Space I/O: A Novel I/O Approach for System-on-a-Chip Networking
For real-time system-on-a-chip (SoC) network applications, high-speed and
low-latency network I/O is the key to achieve predictable execution and high
performance. Existing network I/O approaches are either not directly suited to
SoC applications, or too complicated and expensive. This paper introduces a
novel approach, referred to as shared address space I/O, for real-time SoC
network applications. This approach facilitates building of heterogeneous
multiprocessor systems with application intensive processors (main processor)
and I/O intensive processors (I/O processor), where network I/O processing can
be offloaded to a specialized I/O processor. With the shared address space I/O
approach, in such a system, communication and synchronization between main and
I/O processors can be implemented with a shared address space. This approach is
realized through Atalanta, a heterogeneous real-time SoC operating system we
have developed. In this paper, we demonstrate that shared address space I/O can provide high-speed and low-latency network I/O for SoC
network applications.