[RyanZAG]

Agreed there - maybe a possible option would be to flag a specific port as being non-BSD sockets? So when the kernel reads the port, some short circuit logic could trigger and dump out to a different socket implementation? That would allow legacy to run fine, and then let apps trigger a special flag when binding a socket to allow for direct access. The routing part of tcp/ip happens before BSD sockets are hit, so this should do an end-run around the BSD socket overhead.

Then you could have your system running as normal, but allowing your http server special access to network i/o. Any kernel hackers around who can comment?

[zhemao]

I'm not certain, but it seems from the article that they implemented MegaPipe to run alongside the BSD API. You do have to keep the BSD sockets API alongside the new implementation. Not only because there is a lot of existing code that depends on it, but also because abstracting a socket as a file is actually useful in many cases.