ISIPC: Instant Synchronous Interprocess Communication

Abstract

Interprocess communication (IPC) is often used to exchange data between cooperative processes, and the performance of IPC largely determines the processing time of application programs. Moreover, it is used for most of the kernel calls in a microkernel-based operating system (OS). Therefore, the performance of IPC affects the performance of the OS. In addition, the completion of the messagepassing mechanism has to be indicated by executing a receive operation in order to maintain synchronization. Thus, two operations are required in this mechanism to complete the communication. On the other hand, no receive operation is required to indicate the completion of the communication in the case of asynchronous communication; however, in this case, no proof of the data being received is provided to the sender process. In this paper, we propose an instant synchronous interprocess communication (ISIPC) mechanism that can achieve both instantaneous communication and data synchronization. ISIPC has two functions: push function and sack function. We describe the design of the ISIPC mechanism and also its implementation on the Tender operating system. In addition, we present the evaluation results for the ISIPC mechanism.