The increasing irrelevance of IPC Performance for Micro-kernel-Based Operating Systems
Brian N. Bershad · 1992
IPC is the glue with which traditional operating system services such as networking, and filing, are provided in microkernel-based operating systems. Because applications rely heavily on cross-address space communication, IPC performance is often viewed as being the "Achilles heel" of a microkernel-based operating system. In this paper I discuss four reasons why IPC performance is becoming increasingly irrelevant to overall system performance. 1 Introduction Microkernels such as V [Cheriton 84], Chorus [Rozier et al. 88], and Mach [Accetta et al. 86] provide the infrastructure with which other operating systems such as Unix, MSDOS and VMS can be implemented as user-level programs [Golub et al. 90, Rashid et al. 91, Cheriton et al. 90, Wiecek 92]. Because applications use cross-address space IPC to interact with traditional operating system services, IPC performance has been thought to be the Achilles heel of microkernel-based systems. Even with the improvements in IPC performance tha...