Research Of The Inter-process Communication In The Microkernel

A microkernel is an operating system kernel which furnishes only the most fundamental mechanisms and abstractions. Its designing principle is to implement most of the kernel functions as user-level threads while not compromising the security and robustness of the operating system. The microkernel comprises only the requisite modules like address space, threads management and inter-process communication. The benefit of microkernel and user-level system service is the greatly reduced kernel size, together with the flexibility and security of the whole system.Performance is scarcely attended to when the microkernel is in its embryonic stage, which led to the notoriety of the first generation microkernel. High-level modularization renders the microkernel exceedingly dependent on the inter-process communication, which therefore can directly affect the performance of the microkernel. Although inter-process communication performance has improved greatly in the last decade, it is still too slow on certain processors, thus impeding the further development of microkernel.This thesis researches into the mechanisms to improve the inter-process communication performance of microkernels. Then, it designs and implements a fast intra-address space communication method. This method allows some specific communication to go at the user-level, without the interference of the kernel, and thus chopping off the considerable overhead of entering and exiting the kernel. The benchmark shows that this method can largely improve intra-address space communication, with only a modicum of performance loss for ordinary inter-process communication.