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RT-IPC: An IPC Extension for Real-Time Mach


Takuro Kitayama and Hideyuki Tokuda
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Tatsuo Nakajima
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract

Interprocess communication (IPC) provides the fundamental mechanism for the Mach microkernel to be extensible and flexible. Mach IPC provides efficient communication mechanisms for many applications. However, it does not provide sufficient functionality for real-time applications which have rigid timing constraints among threads. In Real-Time Mach (RT-Mach), we have extended Mach IPC to be priority inversion free for real-time applications.

This paper describes the Real-Time IPC (RT-IPC) facilities, its implementation, and the evaluation results. We used the Distributed Hartstone (DHS) real-time benchmark for the evaluation and the results show that RT-IPC can reduce priority inversion and improve CPU utilization for real-time applications.


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