Low level architecture features for supporting process communication

Abstract
A proposal is presented for low level hardware features which would assist in the realisation of the abstraction of a computer system as a set of asynchronous communicating processes. A low level synchronisation and communication mechanism, called a mailbox, is described, together with details of a hardware structure for configuring a complete system around a set of these mailboxes. Programming for this architecture is then discussed. It is shown how the new features can be used for controlling input/output, and for handling general synchronisation.

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