This disclosure relates to high-performance computing, and more particularly to techniques for kernel-assisted device polling of user-space devices. A common kernel-based polling mechanism is provided for concurrently handling both kernel-based polling for kernel-space devices such as network interfaces (e.g., network NICs) and kernel-based polling for user-space devices such as remote direct memory access devices (e.g., RDMA NICs). Embodiments perform kernel-based polling on a first device that has a corresponding device driver in an operating system kernel. Using the same polling mechanism, the kernel-based polling is performed on a second device, the second device being a user-space device wherein the kernel-based polling on the second device is configured by creating a second device file descriptor that is not associated with a corresponding device driver in the operating system kernel. The kernel-based polling mechanism implements a single polling schedule that is applied to cover both kernel-space device events and user-space device events.