Authors:
János Végh
;
Ádám Kicsák
;
Zsolt Bagoly
and
Péter Molnár
Affiliation:
University of Debrecen, Hungary
Keyword(s):
Operating System, System Call, Hardware Acceleration, Reconfigurable Module, Semaphore, Communication between Processes.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Process Coordination and Synchronization
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Processes running under an operating system are independent and autonomous entities. However, they need to share resources, communicate, use OS services, etc. The operating system’s services can be reached through system calls, which contribute – sometimes excessive – overhead activity. In some cases the payload activity, used in the system call, is much shorter than that needed for implementing the Exceptional Control Flow, implementing the system call frame. In certain cases, the OS service in question can be implemented in an
alternative way, practically without overhead. The paper presents such a case, using an easy to understand simple example, an alternative implementation of a simple binary semaphore. The semaphore has been implemented and tested in a prototyping environment, using an operating system running on a soft processor equipped with custom instruction. For implementing the semaphores, a reconfigurable device was used.