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4.1 Major Concepts

The Mach kernel provides message-oriented, capability-based interprocess communication. The interprocess communication (IPC) primitives efficiently support many different styles of interaction, including remote procedure calls (RPC), object-oriented distributed programming, streaming of data, and sending very large amounts of data.

The IPC primitives operate on three abstractions: messages, ports, and port sets. User tasks access all other kernel services and abstractions via the IPC primitives.

The message primitives let tasks send and receive messages. Tasks send messages to ports. Messages sent to a port are delivered reliably (messages may not be lost) and are received in the order in which they were sent. Messages contain a fixed-size header and a variable amount of typed data following the header. The header describes the destination and size of the message.

The IPC implementation makes use of the VM system to efficiently transfer large amounts of data. The message body can contain the address of a region in the sender's address space which should be transferred as part of the message. When a task receives a message containing an out-of-line region of data, the data appears in an unused portion of the receiver's address space. This transmission of out-of-line data is optimized so that sender and receiver share the physical pages of data copy-on-write, and no actual data copy occurs unless the pages are written. Regions of memory up to the size of a full address space may be sent in this manner.

Ports hold a queue of messages. Tasks operate on a port to send and receive messages by exercising capabilities for the port. Multiple tasks can hold send capabilities, or rights, for a port. Tasks can also hold send-once rights, which grant the ability to send a single message. Only one task can hold the receive capability, or receive right, for a port. Port rights can be transferred between tasks via messages. The sender of a message can specify in the message body that the message contains a port right. If a message contains a receive right for a port, then the receive right is removed from the sender of the message and the right is transferred to the receiver of the message. While the receive right is in transit, tasks holding send rights can still send messages to the port, and they are queued until a task acquires the receive right and uses it to receive the messages.

Tasks can receive messages from ports and port sets. The port set abstraction allows a single thread to wait for a message from any of several ports. Tasks manipulate port sets with a capability, or port-set right, which is taken from the same space as the port capabilities. The port-set right may not be transferred in a message. A port set holds receive rights, and a receive operation on a port set blocks waiting for a message sent to any of the constituent ports. A port may not belong to more than one port set, and if a port is a member of a port set, the holder of the receive right can't receive directly from the port.

Port rights are a secure, location-independent way of naming ports. The port queue is a protected data structure, only accessible via the kernel's exported message primitives. Rights are also protected by the kernel; there is no way for a malicious user task to guess a port name and send a message to a port to which it shouldn't have access. Port rights do not carry any location information. When a receive right for a port moves from task to task, and even between tasks on different machines, the send rights for the port remain unchanged and continue to function.