Evolving Mach 3.0 to A Migrating Thread Model

We have modi ed Mach 3.0 to treat cross-domain remote procedure call (RPC) as a single entity, instead of a sequence of message passing operations. With RPC thus elevated, we improved the transfer of control during RPC by changing the thread model. Like most operating systems, Mach views threads as statically associated with a single task, with two threads involved in an RPC. An alternate model is that of migrating threads, in which, during RPC, a single thread abstraction moves between tasks with the logical ow of control, and \server" code is passively executed. We have compatibly replaced Mach's static threads with migrating threads, in an attempt to isolate this aspect of operating system design and implementation. The key element of our design is a decoupling of the thread abstraction into the execution context and the schedulable thread of control, consisting of a chain of contexts. A key element of our implementation is that threads are now \based" in the kernel, and temporarily make excursions into tasks via upcalls. The new system provides more precisely de ned semantics for thread manipulation and additional control operations, allows scheduling and accounting attributes to follow threads, simpli es kernel code, and improves RPC performance. We have retained the old thread and IPC interfaces for backwards compatibility, with no changes required to existing client programs and only a minimal change to servers, as demonstrated by a functional Unix single server and clients. The logical complexity along the critical RPC path has been reduced by a factor of nine. Local RPC, doing normalmarshaling, has sped up by factors of 1.7{3.4. We conclude that a migrating-thread model is superior to a static model, that kernel-visible RPC is a prerequisite for this improvement, and that it is feasible to improve existing operating systems in this manner.