Chapter 3: Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Process Termination

 Process executes last statement and then asks the

operating system to delete it using the exit()
system call.
 Returns status data from child to parent (via
wait())
 Process’ resources are deallocated by operating
system
 Parent may terminate the execution of children
processes using the abort() system call. Some
reasons for doing so:
 Child has exceeded allocated resources
 Task assigned to child is no longer required
 The parent is exiting and the operating systems
does not allow a child to continue if its parent
terminates

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Process Termination

 Some operating systems do not allow child to exists if

its parent has terminated. If a process terminates,
then all its children must also be terminated.
 cascading termination. All children, grandchildren,
etc. are terminated.
 The termination is initiated by the operating
system.
 The parent process may wait for termination of a child
process by using the wait()system call. The call
returns status information and the pid of the
terminated process
pid = wait(&status);
 If no parent waiting (did not invoke wait()) process is
a zombie
 If parent terminated without invoking wait , process
is an orphan

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multiprocess Architecture – Chrome Browser

 Many web browsers ran as single process (some still

do)
 If one web site causes trouble, entire browser can
hang or crash
 Google Chrome Browser is multiprocess with 3
different types of processes:
 Browser process manages user interface, disk and
network I/O
 Renderer process renders web pages, deals with
HTML, Javascript. A new renderer created for each
website opened
 Runs in sandbox restricting disk and network I/O,
minimizing effect of security exploits
 Plug-in process for each type of plug-in

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication
 Processes within a system may be independent or
cooperating
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by other
processes, including sharing data
 Reasons for cooperating processes:
 Information sharing
 Computation speedup
 Modularity
 Convenience
 Cooperating processes need interprocess
communication (IPC)
 Two models of IPC
 Shared memory
 Message passing

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Cooperating Processes
 Independent process cannot affect or be affected by
the execution of another process
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by the
execution of another process
 Advantages of process cooperation
 Information sharing
 Computation speed-up
 Modularity
 Convenience

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 Paradigm for cooperating processes, producer
process produces information that is consumed
by a consumer process
 unbounded-buffer places no practical limit on
the size of the buffer
 bounded-buffer assumes that there is a fixed
buffer size

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded-Buffer – Shared-Memory Solution

 Shared data
#define BUFFER_SIZE 10
typedef struct {
. . .
} item;

item buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
int in = 0;
int out = 0;

 Solution is correct, but can only use BUFFER_SIZE-1

elements

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded-Buffer – Producer

item next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
while (((in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE) == out)
; /* do nothing */
buffer[in] = next_produced;
in = (in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded Buffer – Consumer

item next_consumed;
while (true) {
while (in == out)
; /* do nothing */
next_consumed = buffer[out];
out = (out + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory

 An area of memory shared among the processes

that wish to communicate
 The communication is under the control of the
users processes not the operating system.
 Major issues is to provide mechanism that will
allow the user processes to synchronize their
actions when they access shared memory.
 Synchronization is discussed in great details in
Chapter 5.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing

 Mechanism for processes to communicate and to

synchronize their actions
 Message system – processes communicate with
each other without resorting to shared variables
 IPC facility provides two operations:
 send(message)
 receive(message)

 The message size is either fixed or variable

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 If processes P and Q wish to communicate, they need to:

 Establish a communication link between them
 Exchange messages via send/receive
 Implementation issues:
 How are links established?
 Can a link be associated with more than two
processes?
 How many links can there be between every pair of
communicating processes?
 What is the capacity of a link?
 Is the size of a message that the link can
accommodate fixed or variable?
 Is a link unidirectional or bi-directional?

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 Implementation of communication link

 Physical:
 Shared memory
 Hardware bus
 Network
 Logical:
 Direct or indirect
 Synchronous or asynchronous
 Automatic or explicit buffering

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Direct Communication
 Processes must name each other explicitly:
 send (P, message) – send a message to process P
 receive(Q, message) – receive a message from
process Q
 Properties of communication link
 Links are established automatically
 A link is associated with exactly one pair of
communicating processes
 Between each pair there exists exactly one link
 The link may be unidirectional, but is usually bi-
directional

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Messages are directed and received from mailboxes
(also referred to as ports)
 Each mailbox has a unique id
 Processes can communicate only if they share a
mailbox
 Properties of communication link
 Link established only if processes share a common
mailbox
 A link may be associated with many processes
 Each pair of processes may share several
communication links
 Link may be unidirectional or bi-directional

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Operations
 create a new mailbox (port)
 send and receive messages through mailbox
 destroy a mailbox
 Primitives are defined as:
send(A, message) – send a message to mailbox A
receive(A, message) – receive a message from mailbox
A

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Mailbox sharing
 P1, P2, and P3 share mailbox A
 P1, sends; P2 and P3 receive
 Who gets the message?
 Solutions
 Allow a link to be associated with at most
two processes
 Allow only one process at a time to execute a
receive operation
 Allow the system to select arbitrarily the
receiver. Sender is notified who the receiver
was.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-
blocking
 Blocking is considered synchronous
 Blocking send -- the sender is blocked until the
message is received
 Blocking receive -- the receiver is blocked until a
message is available
 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
 Non-blocking send -- the sender sends the
message and continue
 Non-blocking receive -- the receiver receives:
 A valid message, or
 Null message
 Different combinations possible
 If both send and receive are blocking, we have a
rendezvous

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Synchronization (Cont.)
 Producer-consumer becomes trivial

message next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
send(next_produced);
}

message next_consumed;
while (true) {
receive(next_consumed);

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Buffering

 Queue of messages attached to the link.

 implemented in one of three ways
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on a
link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n messages
Sender must wait if link full
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite length
Sender never waits

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems - POSIX

 POSIX Shared Memory

 Process first creates shared memory segment
shm_fd = shm_open(name, O CREAT | O RDWR, 0666);
 Also used to open an existing segment to share it
 Set the size of the object
ftruncate(shm fd, 4096);
 Now the process could write to the shared memory
sprintf(shared memory, "Writing to shared
memory");

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 IPC POSIX Producer

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 IPC POSIX Consumer

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems - Mach
 Mach communication is message based
 Even system calls are messages
 Each task gets two mailboxes at creation- Kernel and
Notify
 Only three system calls needed for message transfer
msg_send(), msg_receive(), msg_rpc()
 Mailboxes needed for commuication, created via
port_allocate()
 Send and receive are flexible, for example four options if
mailbox full:
 Wait indefinitely
 Wait at most n milliseconds
 Return immediately
 Temporarily cache a message

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems – Windows

 Message-passing centric via advanced local

procedure call (LPC) facility
 Only works between processes on the same
system
 Uses ports (like mailboxes) to establish and
maintain communication channels
 Communication works as follows:
 The client opens a handle to the subsystem’s
connection port object.
 The client sends a connection request.
 The server creates two private
communication ports and returns the handle
to one of them to the client.
 The client and server use the corresponding
port handle to send messages or callbacks
and to listen for replies.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Local Procedure Calls in Windows

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Communications in Client-Server Systems

 Sockets
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Pipes
 Remote Method Invocation (Java)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Sockets
 A socket is defined as an endpoint for
communication

 Concatenation of IP address and port – a number

included at start of message packet to
differentiate network services on a host

 The socket 161.25.19.8:1625 refers to port 1625 on

host 161.25.19.8

 Communication consists between a pair of sockets

 All ports below 1024 are well known, used for

standard services

 Special IP address 127.0.0.1 (loopback) to refer to

system on which process is running

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Socket Communication

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Sockets in Java

 Three types of sockets

 Connection-
oriented (TCP)
 Connectionless
(UDP)
 MulticastSocket
class– data can be
sent to multiple
recipients

 Consider this “Date”

server:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure
calls between processes on networked systems
 Again uses ports for service differentiation
 Stubs – client-side proxy for the actual procedure
on the server
 The client-side stub locates the server and
marshalls the parameters
 The server-side stub receives this message,
unpacks the marshalled parameters, and
performs the procedure on the server
 On Windows, stub code compile from
specification written in Microsoft Interface
Definition Language (MIDL)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Remote Procedure Calls (Cont.)
 Data representation handled via External Data
Representation (XDL) format to account for
different architectures
 Big-endian and little-endian
 Remote communication has more failure
scenarios than local
 Messages can be delivered exactly once
rather than at most once
 OS typically provides a rendezvous (or
matchmaker) service to connect client and server

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Execution of RPC

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pipes
 Acts as a conduit allowing two processes to
communicate
 Issues:
 Is communication unidirectional or
bidirectional?
 In the case of two-way communication, is it half
or full-duplex?
 Must there exist a relationship (i.e., parent-
child) between the communicating processes?
 Can the pipes be used over a network?
 Ordinary pipes – cannot be accessed from outside
the process that created it. Typically, a parent
process creates a pipe and uses it to communicate
with a child process that it created.
 Named pipes – can be accessed without a parent-
child relationship.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Ordinary Pipes
 Ordinary Pipes allow communication in standard
producer-consumer style
 Producer writes to one end (the write-end of the pipe)
 Consumer reads from the other end (the read-end of the
pipe)
 Ordinary pipes are therefore unidirectional
 Require parent-child relationship between
communicating processes

 Windows calls these anonymous pipes

 See Unix and Windows code samples in textbook

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Named Pipes

 Named Pipes are more powerful than ordinary pipes

 Communication is bidirectional
 No parent-child relationship is necessary between
the communicating processes
 Several processes can use the named pipe for
communication
 Provided on both UNIX and Windows systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 3

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multiprocess Architecture – Chrome Browser

 Many web browsers ran as single process (some still

do)
 If one web site causes trouble, entire browser can
hang or crash
 Google Chrome Browser is multiprocess with 3
different types of processes:
 Browser process manages user interface, disk and
network I/O
 Renderer process renders web pages, deals with
HTML, Javascript. A new renderer created for each
website opened
 Runs in sandbox restricting disk and network I/O,
minimizing effect of security exploits
 Plug-in process for each type of plug-in

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication
 Processes within a system may be independent or
cooperating
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by other
processes, including sharing data
 Reasons for cooperating processes:
 Information sharing
 Computation speedup
 Modularity
 Convenience
 Cooperating processes need interprocess
communication (IPC)
 Two models of IPC
 Shared memory
 Message passing

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Communications Models
(a) Message passing. (b) shared memory.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.42 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Cooperating Processes
 Independent process cannot affect or be affected by
the execution of another process
 Cooperating process can affect or be affected by the
execution of another process
 Advantages of process cooperation
 Information sharing
 Computation speed-up
 Modularity
 Convenience

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.43 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Producer-Consumer Problem
 Paradigm for cooperating processes, producer
process produces information that is consumed
by a consumer process
 unbounded-buffer places no practical limit on
the size of the buffer
 bounded-buffer assumes that there is a fixed
buffer size

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded-Buffer – Shared-Memory Solution

 Shared data
#define BUFFER_SIZE 10
typedef struct {
. . .
} item;

item buffer[BUFFER_SIZE];
int in = 0;
int out = 0;

 Solution is correct, but can only use BUFFER_SIZE-1

elements

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded-Buffer – Producer

item next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
while (((in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE) == out)
; /* do nothing */
buffer[in] = next_produced;
in = (in + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;
}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Bounded Buffer – Consumer

item next_consumed;
while (true) {
while (in == out)
; /* do nothing */
next_consumed = buffer[out];
out = (out + 1) % BUFFER_SIZE;

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication – Shared Memory

 An area of memory shared among the processes

that wish to communicate
 The communication is under the control of the
users processes not the operating system.
 Major issues is to provide mechanism that will
allow the user processes to synchronize their
actions when they access shared memory.
 Synchronization is discussed in great details in
Chapter 5.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.48 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Interprocess Communication – Message Passing

 Mechanism for processes to communicate and to

synchronize their actions
 Message system – processes communicate with
each other without resorting to shared variables
 IPC facility provides two operations:
 send(message)
 receive(message)

 The message size is either fixed or variable

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.49 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 If processes P and Q wish to communicate, they need to:

 Establish a communication link between them
 Exchange messages via send/receive
 Implementation issues:
 How are links established?
 Can a link be associated with more than two
processes?
 How many links can there be between every pair of
communicating processes?
 What is the capacity of a link?
 Is the size of a message that the link can
accommodate fixed or variable?
 Is a link unidirectional or bi-directional?

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Message Passing (Cont.)

 Implementation of communication link

 Physical:
 Shared memory
 Hardware bus
 Network
 Logical:
 Direct or indirect
 Synchronous or asynchronous
 Automatic or explicit buffering

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.51 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Direct Communication
 Processes must name each other explicitly:
 send (P, message) – send a message to process P
 receive(Q, message) – receive a message from
process Q
 Properties of communication link
 Links are established automatically
 A link is associated with exactly one pair of
communicating processes
 Between each pair there exists exactly one link
 The link may be unidirectional, but is usually bi-
directional

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.52 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Messages are directed and received from mailboxes
(also referred to as ports)
 Each mailbox has a unique id
 Processes can communicate only if they share a
mailbox
 Properties of communication link
 Link established only if processes share a common
mailbox
 A link may be associated with many processes
 Each pair of processes may share several
communication links
 Link may be unidirectional or bi-directional

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.53 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Operations
 create a new mailbox (port)
 send and receive messages through mailbox
 destroy a mailbox
 Primitives are defined as:
send(A, message) – send a message to mailbox A
receive(A, message) – receive a message from mailbox
A

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.54 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Indirect Communication
 Mailbox sharing
 P1, P2, and P3 share mailbox A
 P1, sends; P2 and P3 receive
 Who gets the message?
 Solutions
 Allow a link to be associated with at most
two processes
 Allow only one process at a time to execute a
receive operation
 Allow the system to select arbitrarily the
receiver. Sender is notified who the receiver
was.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.55 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Synchronization
 Message passing may be either blocking or non-
blocking
 Blocking is considered synchronous
 Blocking send -- the sender is blocked until the
message is received
 Blocking receive -- the receiver is blocked until a
message is available
 Non-blocking is considered asynchronous
 Non-blocking send -- the sender sends the
message and continue
 Non-blocking receive -- the receiver receives:
 A valid message, or
 Null message
 Different combinations possible
 If both send and receive are blocking, we have a
rendezvous

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.56 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Synchronization (Cont.)
 Producer-consumer becomes trivial

message next_produced;
while (true) {
/* produce an item in next produced */
send(next_produced);
}

message next_consumed;
while (true) {
receive(next_consumed);

/* consume the item in next consumed */

}

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.57 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Buffering

 Queue of messages attached to the link.

 implemented in one of three ways
1. Zero capacity – no messages are queued on a
link.
Sender must wait for receiver (rendezvous)
2. Bounded capacity – finite length of n messages
Sender must wait if link full
3. Unbounded capacity – infinite length
Sender never waits

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems - POSIX

 POSIX Shared Memory

 Process first creates shared memory segment
shm_fd = shm_open(name, O CREAT | O RDWR, 0666);
 Also used to open an existing segment to share it
 Set the size of the object
ftruncate(shm fd, 4096);
 Now the process could write to the shared memory
sprintf(shared memory, "Writing to shared
memory");

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.59 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 IPC POSIX Producer

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.60 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 IPC POSIX Consumer

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.61 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems - Mach
 Mach communication is message based
 Even system calls are messages
 Each task gets two mailboxes at creation- Kernel and
Notify
 Only three system calls needed for message transfer
msg_send(), msg_receive(), msg_rpc()
 Mailboxes needed for commuication, created via
port_allocate()
 Send and receive are flexible, for example four options if
mailbox full:
 Wait indefinitely
 Wait at most n milliseconds
 Return immediately
 Temporarily cache a message

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.62 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Examples of IPC Systems – Windows

 Message-passing centric via advanced local

procedure call (LPC) facility
 Only works between processes on the same
system
 Uses ports (like mailboxes) to establish and
maintain communication channels
 Communication works as follows:
 The client opens a handle to the subsystem’s
connection port object.
 The client sends a connection request.
 The server creates two private
communication ports and returns the handle
to one of them to the client.
 The client and server use the corresponding
port handle to send messages or callbacks
and to listen for replies.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.63 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Local Procedure Calls in Windows

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.64 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Communications in Client-Server Systems

 Sockets
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Pipes
 Remote Method Invocation (Java)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.65 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Sockets
 A socket is defined as an endpoint for
communication

 Concatenation of IP address and port – a number

included at start of message packet to
differentiate network services on a host

 The socket 161.25.19.8:1625 refers to port 1625 on

host 161.25.19.8

 Communication consists between a pair of sockets

 All ports below 1024 are well known, used for

standard services

 Special IP address 127.0.0.1 (loopback) to refer to

system on which process is running

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.66 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Socket Communication

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.67 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Sockets in Java

 Three types of sockets

 Connection-
oriented (TCP)
 Connectionless
(UDP)
 MulticastSocket
class– data can be
sent to multiple
recipients

 Consider this “Date”

server:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.68 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Remote Procedure Calls
 Remote procedure call (RPC) abstracts procedure
calls between processes on networked systems
 Again uses ports for service differentiation
 Stubs – client-side proxy for the actual procedure
on the server
 The client-side stub locates the server and
marshalls the parameters
 The server-side stub receives this message,
unpacks the marshalled parameters, and
performs the procedure on the server
 On Windows, stub code compile from
specification written in Microsoft Interface
Definition Language (MIDL)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.69 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Remote Procedure Calls (Cont.)
 Data representation handled via External Data
Representation (XDL) format to account for
different architectures
 Big-endian and little-endian
 Remote communication has more failure
scenarios than local
 Messages can be delivered exactly once
rather than at most once
 OS typically provides a rendezvous (or
matchmaker) service to connect client and server

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.70 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Execution of RPC

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.71 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pipes
 Acts as a conduit allowing two processes to
communicate
 Issues:
 Is communication unidirectional or
bidirectional?
 In the case of two-way communication, is it half
or full-duplex?
 Must there exist a relationship (i.e., parent-
child) between the communicating processes?
 Can the pipes be used over a network?
 Ordinary pipes – cannot be accessed from outside
the process that created it. Typically, a parent
process creates a pipe and uses it to communicate
with a child process that it created.
 Named pipes – can be accessed without a parent-
child relationship.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.72 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Ordinary Pipes
 Ordinary Pipes allow communication in standard
producer-consumer style
 Producer writes to one end (the write-end of the pipe)
 Consumer reads from the other end (the read-end of the
pipe)
 Ordinary pipes are therefore unidirectional
 Require parent-child relationship between
communicating processes

 Windows calls these anonymous pipes

 See Unix and Windows code samples in textbook

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.73 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Named Pipes

 Named Pipes are more powerful than ordinary pipes

 Communication is bidirectional
 No parent-child relationship is necessary between
the communicating processes
 Several processes can use the named pipe for
communication
 Provided on both UNIX and Windows systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 3.74 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 3

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018