And the potential impact is huge! Not only are individual syscalls expensive on their own, and increasingly so (afaik) with spectre and security issues. You also need a thread to execute the call, which is several KB of memory, compound context switches, and (often overlooked) creating and destroying threads also come with syscall overhead.

Now, we’ve had epoll etc so it’s not novel in that respect. However, what’s truly novel is that it’s universal across syscalls, which makes it almost mechanical to port to a new platform. A lot of intricate questions of high-level API design simply go away and become more simple data layout questions. (I’m sure there are little devils hiding in the details, but still)

With cross-core interrupts and user-mode interrupt handlers (as in some new intel cpus), you could even do something without polling (interrupt for submission) where the core user-mode code is running on _never_ context switches (obviously except for scheduling) and you just have a dedicated kernel core or cores off doing kernel things.