Scalable I/O - A Well-Architected Way to Do Scalable, Secure and Virtualized I/O

Today in both virtualized and non-virtualized systems the entire I/O functionality is based on device drivers. They are central to any system structure; both anecdotal and informed evidence indicates device drivers as a major source of trouble in the classical OS and a source of scaling and performance issues in virtual I/O, due to "Trusted intermediary" required for the shared I/O. The authors propose an architecture which virtualizes the entire I/O subsystem rather than each I/O device, and provides device-independent I/O at higher level of abstraction than the traditional I/O interfaces.