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Summary: Implementing Network Protocols at User Level
Abstract
Chartdramohan A. Thekkath, Thu D. Nguyen, Evelyn Moyt, and
Edward D. Lazowska
Department of Computer Science and Engineering FR-35
Urtiversity of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Traditionally, network software has been structured in a monolithic
fashion with all protocol stacks executing either witbin the kernel or
in a single trusted user-level server. This organization is motivated
by performance and security concerns. However, considerations
of code maintenance, ease of debugging, customization, and the
simultaneous existence of multiple protocols argue for separating
the implementations into more manageable user-level libraries of
protocols. This paper describes the design and implementation of
transport protocols as user-level libraries.
We begin by motivating the need for protocol implementations as
user-level libraries and placing our approach in the context of previ-
ous work. We then describe our alternative to monolithic protocol
organization, which has been implemented on Mach workstations
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