Improving continuous-media playback performance with in-kernel data paths

Continuous media playback suffers when a station´s operating system offers insufficient I/O throughput. Conventional I/O system structures support a memory-oriented read and write interface requiring the execution of user-level processes to facilitate playback, and can incur throughput degradation due to unnecessary data copies. The authors´ splice mechanism supports a peer-to-peer model of I/O where a requesting application, can associate a data source with its corresponding data sink, allowing for system optimizations in the data path implementation. In an experiment designed to simulate remote video playback, they present measurements indicating that use of these techniques resulted in a 55% gain in throughput as compared with conventional systems