Lightweight remote procedure call

  • Authors:

  • B. Bershad;T. Anderson;E. Lazowska;H. Levy

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '89 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Lightweight Remote Procedure Call (LRPC) is a communication facility designed and optimized for communication between protection domains on the same machine.In contemporary small-kernel operating systems, existing RPC systems incur an unnecessarily high cost when used for the type of communication that predominates — between protection domains on the same machine. This cost leads system designers to coalesce weakly-related subsystems into the same protection domain, trading safety for performance. By reducing the overhead of same-machine communication, LRPC encourages both safety and performance.LRPC combines the control transfer and communication model of capability systems with the programming 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 workstation.