• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
• /
• v.32 no.11_12
• /
• pp.557-565
• /
• 2005

This paper presents the development and implementation of a zero-copy file transfer mechanism that improves the efficiency of file transfers for PC cluster systems using hardware-based VIA(Virtual Interface Architecture) network adapters. VIA is one of the representative user-level communication interfaces, but because there is no library for file transfer, one copy occurs between kernel buffer and user boilers. Our mechanism presents a file transfer primitive that does not require the file system to be modified and allows the NIC to transfer data from the kernel buffer to the remote node directly without copying. To do this, we have developed a hardware-based VIA network adapter, which supports the PCI 64bit/66MHz bus and Gigabit Ethernet, as a NIC, and implemented a zero-copy file transfer mechanism. The experimental results show that the overhead of data coy and context switching in the sender is greatly reduced and the CPU utilization of the sender is reduced to $30\%\~40\%$ of the VIA send/receive mechanism. We demonstrate the performance of the zero-copy file transfer mechanism experimentally. and compare the results with those from existing file transfer mechanisms.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
• /
• v.16 no.6
• /
• pp.1133-1144
• /
• 2021

Zero-copy is a technology that is also called no-memory copy, and through its use, context switching between the user space and the kernel space can be reduced to minimize the load on the CPU. However, this technology is only used to transmit small random files, and has not yet been widely used for large file transfers. This paper intends to discuss the practical application of zero-copy in processing large files via a network. To this end, we first developed a small test bed and program that can transmit and store data based on zero-copy. Afterwards, we intend to verify the usefulness of the applied technology in detail through detailed performance evaluation