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4.3 Port Manipulation Interface

This section describes the interface to create, destroy and manipulate ports, port rights and port sets.

— Data type: ipc_space_t

This is a task_t (and as such a mach_port_t), which holds a port name associated with a port that represents an IPC space in the kernel. An IPC space is used by the kernel to manage the port names and rights available to a task. The IPC space doesn't get a port name of its own. Instead the port name of the task containing the IPC space is used to name the IPC space of the task (as is indicated by the fact that the type of ipc_space_t is actually task_t).

The IPC spaces of tasks are the only ones accessible outside of the kernel.