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Accio: Rethinking OS-Architecture Co-Design for Next-Gen I/O

Authors Amirmohammad Nazari , Rajit Manohar , Robert Soulé

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OASIcs.NINeS.2026.21.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Hardware → Networking hardware
  • Computer systems organization → Processors and memory architectures
  • Software and its engineering → Operating systems
Keywords
  • Networks
  • Operating Systems
  • I/O Optimization

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel software/hardware design to improve I/O performance while maintaining existing POSIX-standard APIs. Our approach stands in contrast to existing kernel-bypass strategies that improve performance at the expense of abandoning familiar programming abstractions. Our key insight is that navigating the performance-functionality trade-off requires changes to the processor; it cannot be done without support of the CPU micro-architecture. Our design, called Accio, includes: dedicated hardware for interrupt management, a hardware assist for thread scheduling, tables in hardware that manage I/O state, and modifications to the operating system to support the new hardware. Our evaluation demonstrates that Accio saturates the bus bandwidth, reduces CPU usage by up to 66% compared to state-of-the-art kernel-bypass systems, and reduces latency to 1/12th of that of the Linux kernel, matching that of kernel-bypass systems.

Cite As Get BibTex

Amirmohammad Nazari, Rajit Manohar, and Robert Soulé. Accio: Rethinking OS-Architecture Co-Design for Next-Gen I/O. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 21:1-21:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.21

Author Details

Amirmohammad Nazari
  • Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Rajit Manohar
  • Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Robert Soulé
  • Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under awards #2212235, #2420367, #2415262, and #2449506.

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous NINeS reviewers and our shepherd, Justine Sherry, for their valuable feedback.

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