Supporting user-level exception handling on a multiprocessor micro-kernel: experiences with PLATINUM
Robert J. Fowler, Leonidas I. Kontothanassis · 1992
We describe the facilities provided by PLATINUM, a multiprocessor micro-kernel, to support user-level exception handling. The principal design goal for these facilities is to provide a very simple mechanism with sufficient flexibility and efficiency to experiment with the implementation of a wide variety of exception-driven, user-level services in a parallel system. These services provide conventional exception handling, an interface between parallel programs and debugging or performance monitoring tools, user-level paging and I/O services, and support for user-level lightweight process packages. The exception handling facility is based on fast message passing using a reconfigurable hierarchy of mailboxes. The mechanisms we describe have performance comparable to their uniprocessor signal handling under Unix, and retain that performance when used on a multiprocessor to support the kind of exception-driven services demanded by a parallel programming environment. 1 Flexible Exception Ha...