A technique for tracking a state of one or more input/output (I/O) channels associated with an application, by the application itself, comprises the steps of: (i) storing, by an operating system kernel, one or more selected elements of the state of at least a portion of the one or more I/O channels associated with the application in a memory which is shared by the application and the operating system kernel, when the one or more elements are available to the operating system kernel; (ii) acquiring, by the application, at least a portion of the stored elements through one or more memory read operations of the shared memory; and (iii) assessing, by the application, one or more of the acquired elements to determine the state of the one or more I/O channels corresponding thereto. In this manner, a need for context switching to track the state of the one or more I/O channels is thereby eliminated.