A software framework for Linux device drivers aimed at supporting controls and data acquisition hardware. ZIO supports sub-nanosecond timestamps, block-oriented input and output and transport of meta-data with the data samples. Users can change the buffer type and trigger type associated with a device at run time, and all of devices, triggers and buffers are easily implemented as add-on modules.

The PF_ZIO implementation, currently in beta status, implements a network interface to the ZIO transport, which allows each I/O channel to generate or receive network frames. Applications see the network of devices and can talk with several of them from the same socket. We support SOCK_STREAM, SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_RAW.