Methods, systems, and apparatus for object invocation across protection domain boundaries

Abstract

Methods, apparatus, systems, and computer program products for invoking remote process calls and facilitating inter-process communications in a protected memory system employ a kernel that supports remote invocation of objects by a system call. The system call may include an object identifier and a set of pointers to input and output buffers. The kernel locates the specified object in a separate server process domain and awakens a server thread within the server domain to invoke the object. Using provided memory pointers, the kernel can copy input and output data across the protection domains in a single step without the need for copying data into an intermediate buffer. This eliminates the overhead of multiple data copy steps that are required in conventional protected memory systems.

Description

[0001] Claim of priority under 35 U.S.C. §119 [0002] This patent application claims the 60th / 867,787, assigned to the present assignee and expressly incorporated herein by reference. technical field [0003] The described aspects relate to data processing methods, and more particularly, to methods and systems for efficiently invoking objects and replicating data across protection domain boundaries in a computer system partitioned into different protection domains. Background technique [0004] Computer systems implementing a protected-mode operating system segment physical memory into separate virtual address spaces or regions that can be accessed by certain processes or protection domains. Some memory is allocated to and accessible only by the kernel of a computer system, known as kernel space or kernel domain, while other memory is made accessible by applications, known as user space or user domain. When multiple processes are running concurrently, each process is as...

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Problems solved by technology

Therefore, interprocess communication using pipes is inefficient because two separate copy operations are involved in each direction

[0007] Shared memory can also be used for interprocess communication; however, implementing shared memory requires the two protection domains to agree on a non-general data sharing scheme

It is worth noting that agreeing on non-general data sharing schemes is not easy to achieve, because the calling process needs to predict how the receiving process will receive the data

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