Efficient Memory-Mapped I/O Access for BMC Applications

The efficient operation and management of data centers serve as the backbone for the rapid growth of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry. Within this context, the Input/Output (I/O) access of the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) plays a pivotal role. For Linux-based BMC systems, conventional I/O access methods often incur significant system call overheads, thereby hindering the performance of BMC applications. In this paper, we concentrate on the bottlenecks that hinder I/O access and introduce an improved conventional I/O access method (ICIOAM). This approach effectively streamlines the system call overheads inherent in the traditional I/O access method. Furthermore, to further elevate I/O access performance, we introduce an innovative physical memory's address mapping-based I/O access method (PMAM-IOAM). This novel approach bypasses the existing I/O access mechanisms of the Linux kernel and executes I/O operations directly on the memory-mapped address space. Experimental evaluations and comprehensive analysis of ICIOAM and PMAM-IOAM confirm that, for typical BMC applications, these two methods offer a significant performance boost. Specifically, they achieve I/O access speeds that are approximately and 18 times faster than the conventional I/O access method, respectively.