Comment by gorset
16 days ago
Mechanisms for getting the linux kernel out of the way is pretty decent these days, and CPUs with a lot of cores are common. That means you can isolate a bunch of cores and pin threads the way you want, and then use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly. Communicate between cores using ring buffers.
This gives you best of both worlds - carefully designed system for the hardware with near optimal performance, and still with the ability to take advantage of the full linux kernel for management, monitoring, debugging, etc.
> use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly
You can always mmap /dev/mem to get at physical memory.
No, that's not really what kernel bypass means.
Accessing hardware directky via /dev/mem is literally the original kernel bypass strategy, before we got the UIO and VFIO APIs to do it in a blessed way.