Lightweight Remote Procedure Call

Lightweight Remote Procedure Call

BRIAN N. BERSHAD, THOMAS E. ANDERSON, EDWARD D. LAZOWSKA,

and HENRY M. LEVY

University of Washington

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.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.1.3. [Processor Architectures]: Other Architecture Styles￾capability architectures; D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Constructs--modules, puck￾ages; D.4.1 [Operating Systems]: Process Management-concurrency, multiprocessing/multipro￾gramming, scheduling; D.4.4 [Operating Systems]: Communications Management; D.4.6 [Oper￾ating Systems]: Security and Protection--access controls, information flow controls; D.4.7 [Oper￾ating Systems]: Organization and Design; D.4.8 [Operating Systems]: Performance￾measurements

General Terms: Design, Measurement, Performance

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Modularity, remote procedure call, small-kernel operating

systems

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper describes Lightweight Remote Procedure Call (LRPC), a communi￾cation facility designed and optimized for communication between protection

domains on the same machine.

This paper was nominated for publication in Z’OCS by the Program Committee for ACM SIGOPS

Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 1989.

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants CCR￾8619663, CCR-8700106, and CCR-8703049, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, U.S. WEST Advanced

Technologies, the Washington Technology Center, and Digital Equipment Corporation (the Systems

Research Center and the External Research Program). Anderson was supported by an IBM Graduate

Fellowship Award, and Bershad was supported by an AT&T Ph.D. Scholarship.

Authors’ address: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington,

Seattle, WA 98195.

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ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 1990, Pages 37-55.