Check out the new USENIX Web site. next up previous
Next: Macrobenchmark Up: Performance Previous: IPC Operations

Revocation Operations


 
Table: Measured cost of revoking IPC connections. A connection is established from a client to a server and then is immediately revoked. Increasing numbers of interposed threads are used to increase the work done for each revocation.
connections revocation time
1 1.55 ms
2 1.56 ms
4 1.57 ms
8 1.60 ms
16 1.65 ms
 

The possible microkernel revocation operations are described in Section 5.4. For demonstration purposes we chose to evaluate the most expensive of those operations, IPC revocation. Table 4 shows the results with varying numbers of active connections. The large base case is due to the need to stop all threads in the system when an IPC revocation is processed. The Fluke kernel provides a mechanism to cancel a thread and wait for it to enter a stopped state when the kernel wishes to examine or modify the thread's state. The stop operation cannot be blocked indefinitely by the thread's activities nor by the activities of any other thread. Since a thread must be stopped prior to examination in order to ensure that it is in a well-defined state, the current Flask implementation must stop all threads when an IPC revocation is processed. Thus, the current implementation meets the completeness and timeliness requirements of the architecture but is quite costly. In contrast, the actual cost to examine and update the state of the affected threads is small in relation, and as expected scales linearly with the number of connections. Changing the Fluke kernel to permit greater concurrency during the processing of a revocation request remains as future work.

The frequency of policy changes is obviously policy dependent, but the usual examples of policy changes are externally driven and therefore will be infrequent. Moreover, a performance loss in a system with frequent policy changes should not be unexpected as it is fundamentally a new feature provided by the system. Obviously, even these uncommon operations should be completed as fast as possible, but that has not been a major consideration in the current implementation.


next up previous
Next: Macrobenchmark Up: Performance Previous: IPC Operations
Stephen D. Smalley
1999-07-13