[hackernudes]

I think the OP's proposal has buffering.

It is different from a pipe - instead of using read/write to copy data from/to a kernel buffer, it gives user space a mapped buffer object and they need to take care to use it properly (using atomic operations on the head/tail and such).

If you own the code for the reader and writer, it's like using shared memory for a buffer. The proposal is about standardizing an interface.