Implementing Remote Procedure Calls, by Birrell and Nelson

1. Implementing Remote Procedure Calls, by Birrell and Nelson

4. Basic idea of RPC - emulate what happens with a local procedure call, only

5. get the results from a server across the network

7. RPC is a fundamental mechanism for network programming, used by NFS, is similar to RMI in OO languages such as Java, CORBA, is model

8. used in DCE and OGSA.

10. Birrell and Nelson chose RPC for solving their problems, other

11. choices include

12. message passing (still have same design problems)

13. remote fork (again, same design problems)

14. distributed shared memory

19. Review of how a local procedure call works:

21. main() {

22. ...

23. myretval = mysub(myparm);

24. ...

26. }

28. int mysub(int myparm) {

30. /* calculate return value */

31. return(returnvalue);

33. With a local procedure call:

34. steps: push myparm onto stack

35. push return address onto stack

36. branch to address of mysub

37. /* allocate stack space for local variables */

38. get myparm from stack, calculate return value

39. push return value onto stack

40. /* fix stack */

41. branch to return address

42. get return value from stack and assign to myretval

43. fix stack

47. No stack or local shared memory with remote procedure call! Everything has to be done with message passing.

50. With RPC