Technical Report 2002-009

SILK: Scout Paths in the Linux Kernel

Andy Bavier, Thiemo Voigt, Mike Wawrzoniak, Larry Peterson, and Per Gunningberg

February 2002

SILK stands for Scout In the Linux Kernel, and is a port of the Scout operating system to run as a Linux kernel module. SILK forms a replacement networking subsystem for standard Linux 2.4 kernels. Linux applications create and use Scout paths via the Linux socket interface with virtually no modifications to the applications themselves. SILK provides Linux applications with the benefits of Scout paths, including early packet demultiplexing, per-flow accounting of resources, and explicit scheduling of network processing. SILK also introduces the concept of an extended path to provide a framework for application QoS. We demonstrate the utility of SILK by showing how it can provide QoS for the Apache Web server.

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