COMMON PRIMITIVES FOR SYNCHRONIZATION PROTOCOLS

There are two seemingly quite distinct inter-process communication (TP C) models: sharedvariable and message-passing. The former is based on the mutual exclusion synchronisation protocol, while the latter is bas ed on the rendezvous protocol. Mutual exclusion is supported at the ha rdware level by spin lock and memory arbiter while rendezvous is suppo rted by the interrupt system. On the other hand, it has been stressed that the two models are functionally equivalent or that they are dual of each other. The goal of this paper is to advance an understanding o f these relationships by searching for common roots of such different concepts as memory arbiter and the interrupt system. We analyse the st ructure of memory arbiter and the interrupt system to come to the conc lusion that they are two different abstractions of the client-server s ystem. The results of the analysis are used for creating analytical to ols for modelling and performance evaluation of systems of concurrent processes as well as in searching for new, more efficient high-level L PC primitives.