Applicant's high-speed input/output signaling mechanism makes exclusive use of one or more processors (CPU) for polling. Device- bound perpetual polling (2) is initiated neither by the device nor by the processing application (1): it takes place independently of the on a CPU exclusively reserved for that task. Another aspect of the present invention is that communication with the I/O device is through the use of "DMA descriptors" (3) that reside in the main memory of the system. In an embodiment, a special purpose device that lacks the full architecture of a typical CPU may play the role of the exclusive polling CPU.
