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IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System VIVEK S. PAI, PETER DRUSCHEL, and WILLY ZWAENEPOEL Rice University This article 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 applications, the interprocess communication system, the file system, the file cache, and the network subsystem to safely and concurrently share a single physical copy of the data. Protection and security are maintained through a combination of access control and read-only sharing. IO-Lite eliminates all copying and multiple buffering of I/O data, and enables various cross-subsystem optimizations. Experiments with a Web server show performance improve- ments between 40 and 80% on real workloads as a result of IO-Lite. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.4 [Operating Systems]: Communications Manage- ment; D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Performance General Terms: Management, Performance Additional Key Words and Phrases: zero-copy, networking, caching, I/O buffering 1. INTRODUCTION For many users, the perceived speed of computing is increasingly depen- dent on the performance of networked server systems, underscoring the need for high-performance servers. Unfortunately, general-purpose operat- ing systems provide inadequate support for server applications, leading to poor server performance and increased hardware cost of server systems. One source of the problem is lack of integration among the various input-output (I/O) subsystems and applications in general-purpose operat- ing systems. Each I/O subsystem uses its own buffering or caching mecha- nism, and applications generally maintain their own private I/O buffers. This ap