A kernel level message passing service

[Gerry Creager N5JXS]

Bryce Bockman wrote:
> 
> I have recently become aware of work being done to incorporate certain
> types of services (ex: web servers) into the kernel of unix systems, so
> as to take away a level of abstraction, and eliminate the overhead in
> performing system calls from user space, thus creating a more efficient
> server.
> 
> My question is this:
> 
> Does is make sense that this sort of thing could be applied to a message
> passing interfaces for any sizable gain in performance?  If so, is there
> any work already being done on this topic?
> 
> My initial reaction to the thought is that there would be all kinds of
> security issues, but maybe some sort of "safe" API could be developed to
> address these issues.

I think, at least at first blush, that this could be a really welcome
addition for those of us performing message passing and using scalable
parallelism in this forum (OK, flashy words to say, "All of us.").  That
said, I think we need to think through this and see if it would be
something Linus could implement into a production kernel without
forking, or would we cause a kernel fork that would cause us to lose the
benefit of continued development, and have to reintegrate the messaging
functionality patch into each subsequent release?

Gerry
--
Gerry Creager		gerry at cs.tamu.edu, gerry at page4.cs.tamu.edu
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