SECTION C

DOS
OF SESSIONAL III
By sukant chhabra
Submitted to-Dr Sudesh Jakhar
CONTENTS
• Shared variables
• Process management in MACH
• Communication in MACH
• EXAMPLE of MACH communication
SHARED VARIABLES
• Shared Variables. Shared variables are used to save the state, either
at the module level or for the duration of a job.
• Using shared variables, you can share data across process instances
associated with a module or a job.
• A process instance can read or update the data stored in a shared
variable.
Process management in MACH
• A process in Mach consists primarily of an address space and a
collection of threads that execute in that address space.
• Processes are passive.
• Execution is associated with the threads. Processes are used for
collecting all the resources related to a group of cooperating threads
into convenient containers.
Continued..
• . In addition to an address space and threads, it has some ports and
other properties.
• The ports shown in the figure all have special functions. The process
port is used to communicate with the kernel.
• Many of the kernel services that a process can request are done by
sending a message to the process port, rather than making a system
call.
• This mechanism is used throughout Mach to reduce the actual
system calls to a bare minimum.
• A small number of them will be discussed in this chapter, to give an
idea of what they are like.
COMMUNICATION IN MACH
• The goal of communication in Mach is to support a variety of styles of
communication in a reliable and flexible way (Draves, 1990).
• It can handle asynchronous message passing, RPC, byte streams, and
other forms as well.
• Mach's interprocess communication mechanism is based on that of
its ancestors, RIG and Accent.
1. A port is shown in figure .
2. When a port is created, 64
bytes of kernel storage space
are allocated and maintained
until the port is destroyed,
either explicitly, or implicitly
under certain conditions, for
example, when all the
processes that are using it have
exited.
3. The port contains the fields
shown in Fig. 8-13 and a few
others.
Continued ..
• When a thread creates a port, it gets back an integer identifying the
port, analogous to a file descriptor in UNIX.
• This integer is used in subsequent calls that send messages to the
port or receive messages from it in order to identify which port is to
be used
• . Ports are kept track of per process, not per thread, so if one thread
creates a port and gets back the integer 3 to identify it, another
thread in the same process will never get 3 to identify its new port.
• The kernel, in fact, does not even maintain a record of which thread
created which port.
CAPABILTIES(CONTINUED..)

 Each capability consists not only of a pointer to a port, but also a rights
field telling what access the holder of the capability has to the port. (All
the threads in a process are equally considered holders of the process'
capabilities.)
 Three rights exist: RECEIVE, SEND, and SEND-ONCE. The RECEIVE right
gives the holder the ability to read messages from the port.
 Earlier we mentioned that communication in Mach is unidirectional.
What this really means is that at any instant only one process may have
the RECEIVE right for a port.
 A capability with a RECEIVE right may be transferred to another
process, but doing so causes it to be removed from the sender's
capability list. Thus for each port there is a single potential receiver.
Example ->
THANKS