Improving IPC by Kernel Design

Inter-process communication (ipc) has to be fast and e ective, otherwise programmers will not use remote procedure calls(RPC),multithreadingand multitasking adequately. Thus ipc performance is vital for modern operating systems, especially -kernel based ones. Surprisingly, most -kernels exhibit poor ipc performance, typically requiring 100 s for a short message transfer on a modern processor, running with 50 MHz clock rate. In contrast, we achieve 5 s a twentyfold improvement. This paper describes the methods and principles used, starting from the architectural design and going down to the coding level. There is no single trick to obtaining this high performance rather, a synergetic approach in design and implementation on all levels is needed. The methods and their synergy are illustrated by applyingthem to a concrete example,the L3 -kernel (an industrial-quality operating system in daily use at several hundred sites). The main ideas are to guide the complete kernel design by the ipc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Jochen Liedtke
• Keywords: Example, Ipc Performance, Operating System, SOSP 1993