IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of IO-Lite, a unified I/O buffering and caching system for general-purpose operating systems. IO-Lite unifies all buffering and caching in the system, to the extent permitted by the hardware. In particular, it allows appliations, the interprocess communication system, the filesystem, the file cache, and the network subsystem to safely and concurrently share a single physical copy of the data. Protection and se urity are maintained through a combination of a\ud \ud ess \ud ontrol and read-only sharing. IO-Lite eliminates all \ud opying and multiple buering of I/O data, and enables various \ud ross-subsystem optimizations. Experiments with a Web server show performan\ud e improvements between 40 and 80 % on real workloads as a result of IO-Lite