Stub-Code Performance Is Becoming Important

As IPC mechanisms become faster, stub-code efficiency becomes a performance issue for local client/server RPCs and inter-component communication. Inefficient and unnecessary complex marshalling code can almost double communication costs. We have developed an experimental new IDL compiler that produces nearoptimal stub code for gcc and the L4 microkernel. The current experimental IDL compiler cooperates with the gcc compiler and its x86 code generator. Other compilers or target machines would require different optimizations. In most cases, the generated stub code is approximately 3 times faster (and shorter) than the code generated by a commonly used portable IDL compiler. Benchmarks have shown that efficient stubs can increase application performance by more than 10 percent. The results are applied within IBM's SawMill project that aims at technology for constructing multi-server operating systems. 1 Motivation Multi-server and component-based systems are promising architectural ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: WIESS
• Authors: Andreas Haeberlen, Jochen Liedtke, Yoonho Park, Lars Reuther, Volkmar Uhlig
• Keywords: Idl Compilers, Portable Idl Compiler, Software Engineering, Stub Code, WIESS 2000