Asynchronous and Synchronous Remote Procedure Call Communication

The IPC services allow threads to exchange messages in either asynchronous mode or in Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mode (demand/response mode).

asynchronous mode:

The sender of an asynchronous message is only blocked for the time taken for the system to process the message locally. The system does not guarantee that the message has been deposited at the destination location.

synchronous RPC mode:

The RPC protocol allows the construction of client-server applications, using a demand/response protocol with management of transactions. The client is blocked until a response is returned from the server, or a user-defined optional timeout occurs. RPC guarantees at-most-once semantics for the delivery of the request. It also guarantees that the response received by a client is definitely that of the server and corresponds effectively to the request (and not to a former request to which the response might have been lost). RPC also allows a client to be unblocked (with an error result) if the server is unreachable or if the server has crashed before emitting a response. Finally, this protocol supports the propagation of abortion through the RPC. This mechanism is called abort propagation, that is, when a thread that is waiting for an RPC reply is aborted, this event is propagated to the thread that is currently servicing the client request.

A thread attempting to receive a message on a port is blocked until a message is received, or until a user-defined optional timeout occurs. A thread can attempt to receive a message on several ports at a time. Among the set of ports attached to an actor, a subset of enabled ports is defined. A thread can attempt to receive a message sent to any of its actor's enabled ports. Ports attached to an actor can be enabled or disabled dynamically. When a port is enabled, it receives a priority value. If several of the enabled ports hold a message when a thread attempts to receive messages on them, the port with the highest priority is selected. The actor's default port might not necessarily be enabled.

When a port is not enabled, it is disabled. This does not mean that the port cannot be used to send or receive messages. It only means that the port cannot be used in multiple-port receive requests. The default value is disabled.