Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

14.6. Implementation of asynchronous message passing

If asynchronous message passing is used in a distributed system it must be integrated with communications services; we cover this topic in Chapter 16. In both centralized and distributed implementations buffer management is an issue.

In a shared-memory system, processes manage their own data transfers through producer–consumer buffering, supported by underlying mechanisms which bear little implementation overhead. The processes have to do more work for themselves to achieve IPC but only the processes involved in the IPC are affected by this overhead (the overhead is in the context of the processes using the mechanism).

In a system with no shared memory, messages may need to be copied twice: ...