kerneldatastromen

Kerneldatastromen is a conceptual model for organizing and moving data within an operating system kernel. It treats data movement as continuous streams composed of data items (frames, packets, or records), enabling high-throughput, low-latency transfer between kernel subsystems and between kernel and user space. Streams are produced by kernel components such as drivers and subsystems, and consumed by others like network stacks, file systems, or tracing tools. The model emphasizes backpressure, ordering guarantees, and the ability to compose simple components into complex pipelines.

Architecture and core concepts include streams, producers, and consumers connected by channels or ports; buffers or memory pools; and mechanisms for synchronization, such as spinlocks or mutexes, and for zero-copy data transfer. A stream graph can describe how data flows from sources to sinks, with support for branching, merging, and prioritization. Items carry metadata such as timestamps, sequence numbers, and flags for end-of-stream or errors.

Common use cases include network packet processing pipelines, device I/O paths, multimedia data processing, tracing and observability, and kernel-to-user-space interfaces. Implementations may rely on existing kernel facilities such as ring buffers, memory mapping, and notification primitives, augmented with streaming semantics and lifecycle management. The approach aims to reduce copies, improve cache locality, and provide modular composition.

Challenges include ensuring safety in a concurrent kernel environment, memory management, backpressure handling to prevent resource exhaustion, and portability across architectures. Because kerneldatastromen is not a standardized term, real-world adoption varies, and discussions often focus on interoperability with existing kernel subsystems and user-space interfaces.