Lightweight remote procedure call

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Lightweight Remote Procedure Call (LRPC) is a com- munication facility designed and optimized for commu- nication between protection domains on the (same ma- chine. In contemporary small-kernel operating systems, ex- isting RPC systems incur an unnecessarily high cost when used for the type of communication that pre- dominates - between protection domains on the same machine. This cost leads system designers to coalesce weakly-related subsystems into the same protection do- main, trading safety for performance. By reducing the overhead of same-machine communication, LRPC en- courages both safety and performance. LRPC combines the control transfer and communi- cation model of capability systems with the program- ming semantics and large-grained protection model of RPC. LRPC achieves a factor of three performance improvement over more traditional approaches based on independent threads exchanging messages, reducing the cost of same-machine communication to nearly the lower bound imposed by conventional hardware. LRPC has been integrated into the Taos operating system of the DEC SRC Firefly multiprocessor work- station.

This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit: