Efficient sleep/wake-up protocols for user-level IPC

We present a new facility for cross-address space IPC that exploits queues in memory shared between the client and server address space. The facility employs only widely available operating system mechanisms, and is hence easily portable to different commercial operating systems. It incorporates blocking semantics to avoid wasting processor cycles, and still achieves almost twice the throughput of the native kernel-mediated IPC facilities on SGI and IBM uniprocessors. In addition, we demonstrate significantly higher performance gains on an SGI multiprocessor. We argue that co-operating tasks will be better served if the operating system is aware of the co-operation, and propose an interface for a hand-off-scheduling mechanism. Finally, we report initial performance results from a Linux implementation of our proposal.