Interprocess Communication Performance Research Articles

General and Fast Inter-Process Communication via Bypassing Privileged Software

IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a widely used operating system (OS) technique that allows one process to invoke the services of other processes. The IPC participants may share the same OS ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">internal IPC</i> ) or use a separate OS ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">external IPC</i> ). Even though a long line of researches has optimized the performance of IPC, it is still a major factor of the run-time overhead of IPC-intensive applications. Furthermore, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for both internal and external IPC. This paper presents SkyBridge, a general communication technique designed and optimized for both types of IPC. SkyBridge requires no involvement of the privileged software (the kernel or the hypervisor) and enables a process to directly switch to the virtual address space of the target process, regardless of whether they are running on the same OS or not. We have implemented SkyBridge on two microkernels (seL4 and Google Zircon) as well as an open-source serverless hypervisor (Firecracker). The evaluation results show that SkyBridge improves the latency of internal IPC and external IPC by up to 19.6x and 1265.7x, respectively.

Fast Control Method of Software-Managed TLB for Reducing Zero-Copy Communication Overhead

SUMMARY Microkernel operating systems (OSes) use zero-copy communication to reduce the overhead of copying transfer data, because the communication between OS servers occurs frequently in the case of microkernel OSes. However, when a memory management unit manages the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) using software, TLB misses tend to increase the overhead of interprocess communication (IPC) between OS servers running on a microkernel OS. Thus, improving the control method of a software-managed TLB is important for microkernel OSes. This paper proposes a fast control method of software-managed TLB that manages page attachment in the area used for IPC by using TLB entries, instead of page tables. Consequently, TLB misses can be avoided in the area, and the performance of IPC improves. Thus, taking the SH-4 processor as an example of a processor having a software-managed TLB, this paper describes the design and the implementation of the proposed method for AnT oper

ISIPC: Instant Synchronous Interprocess Communication

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.

An operating system extension for a multiprocessor

Abstract In the last few years computer architectures based on multiple processors have massively crossed the border from the mere academic research systems domain to the real world of industrial and consumer applications. New operating systems (OSs) for these parallel machines are now readily available. Some are true multiprocessor or distributed OSs, others are simpler single processor multitasking OSs which have been extended to allow users to take advantage from parallel machines with a minimum cost. In this paper we present a practical development based on this last approach – an extension for the Microware's OS9 operating system which we have developed for our bus-based multiprocessor. The OS extension adds basically a new interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism, which is built around the message model using channels and virtual circuits. Application processes residing on different processors communicate through messages in a transparent way. The IPC performance figures obtained match or exceed the ones reported for similar systems. The presentation highlights the problems faced and the solutions found in the implementation of well-known OS concepts.