A prototype for interprocess communication support, in hardware

In message based systems, interprocess communication (IPC) is a central facility. If the IPC part is ineffective in such a system, it will decrease the performance and response time. By implementing the IPC facility in hardware, the administration (scheduling, message handling, time-out supervising etc.), is reduced on the CPU, which leads to more time left for the application and a more deterministic time behaviour. This paper describes a hardware implementation of asynchronous IPC in an RTU based architecture. RTU is a hardware implementation of a real-time kernel for uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems. In addition, our implementation of IPC supports message priority, priority inheritance on message arrival, and task time-out on message send/receive. An increased performance and message flow, in a message intense system, can be realized by implementing IPC functions in an RTU architecture