Application controlled IPC synchrony - An event driven multithreaded approach

Abstract

Interprocess communication (IPC) is an important phenomenon in distributed computing and operating systems. Microkernels of modern operating systems use synchronous IPC semantics for every individual process. On the other hand, a process may exploit non-blocking IPC semantics. In either case, the controlling mechanism belies in the hand of the underlying operating system. IPC monitors open up for misinterpretation of IPC timeout events due to thread unavailability in dynamic multithreaded systems. In this paper we propose a software architecture applicable to distributed systems, which confers the decision on IPC semantics during execution to the processes so that they can admix blocking and non-blocking semantics in a flexible way, case by case, as needed. Moreover, the concept of thread pool is introduced to eliminate the possibility of misinterpretation of IPC timeout events by monitors. Worker threads in a thread pool are effectively scheduled to minimize the waste of processing time and dynamic thread overhead. Event driven and multithreaded system models are diagonally opposite during execution. However, our architecture utilizes the benefits of an event driven model with that of a multithreaded model in a fruitful manner to exploit concurrency and protection. The software implementation of our proposed architecture is made as a middleware extension on the communication subsystem of Windows operating systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.