Moving out of the kernel to improve performance?
I find that a distinctly odd occurrence. Historically things were put into the kernel because it was faster than userspace. So much faster that it was worth the programming difficulty, potential security holes and risk of locking up the system to do it for some things (excluding things like device drivers, which needed access to raw hardware and had to be in the kernel).
If anyone wanted performance above all else, they used to put it in the kernel. Is it really possible that Linux's network stack has become so inefficient and convoluted, that a userspace stack is actually magnitudes faster? That just sounds nuts. Admittedly the last time I had a good look at the network stack was in Linux 2.4 and early 2.6, so I might be out of date w.r.t the state of the art, but still, things in userspace being faster than kernel space just sounds wrong to me. Am I missing something?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
