Using the Mach Communication Primitives in X11

Abstract

We have modified the X11 windowing system to use the native communication facilities of the Mach 3.0 microkernel. Our new implementation can rely on Mach's low-overhead IPC facility as a direct replacement for sockets, or it can use shared memory as a transport between X11 clients and the server. On conventional BSD Unix systems, X11 communication is done through sockets. Because a user-level process implements Unix functionality on top of Mach 3.0, a socket-based version of X11 performs substantially worse than when running a monolithic Unix kernel. Using Mach IPC as the transport between XI l clients and the server, X11 performance is slightly better than that of a monolithic system in which sockets am implemented inside the kernel as opposed to within a user level process. Using Mach's shared memory facilities as the transport, we have measured performance improvements of over 40%.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1993
Accession Number
ADA264049

Entities

People

  • Brian N. Bershad
  • Michael Ginsberg
  • Robert V. Baron

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Communication Channels
  • Communication Systems
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Data Transmission
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Department Of Defense
  • Information Science
  • New Mexico
  • Operating Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Programming Languages
  • Switches
  • Transport Protocols
  • Transport Ships

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.