[CSE]  Advanced Operating Systems 
 COMP9242 2002/S2 
UNSW

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IPC

  • Message-passing IPC provides communication between threads.

  • All IPC is
    • synchronous (i.e., blocking), and
    • unbuffered
    This is key to high IPC performance

  • IPC requires an agreement between sender and receiver
    (i.e., receiver must be expecting IPC, must provide buffers, etc.).
    • IPC supports in-line and out-of-line by-value data.
    • IPC supports map and grant VM operations for by-reference data.

  • Blocking can be limited by timeouts.

Note the interaction between IPC and threads:

  • threads need efficient IPC to talk,
  • blocking IPC needs low-cost threads to be efficient.



Gernot Heiser 2002-08-07