14.4. Asynchronous message passing

Message passing as an IPC mechanism has been in use since the late 1960s, at the same time that Dijkstra used the semaphore mechanism in the single-address-space THE operating system. Examples of the use of this mechanism within a single computer are the MU5 design at Manchester University (Morris and Detlefsen, 1969; Morris and Ibett, 1979) and the operating system for the RC4000 (Brinch Hansen, 1970). Message passing was used in distributed systems from their earliest days, as a natural mechanism for cross-address-space IPC when the address spaces are on different computers. In this chapter we study message passing in general terms, both for centralized and distributed implementations. In Chapter 16 we consider ...

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