Using Continuations to Implement Thread Management and Communication in Operating Systems.

Richard P. Draves, Brian N. Bershad, Richard F. Rashid, Randall W. Dean. Using Continuations to Implement Thread Management and Communication in Operating Systems. [postscript] Technical Report CMU-CS-91-115, Carnegie Mellon University, October 1991. Also appears in the proceedings of the Thirteenth Symposium on Operating Systems(SOSP).

We have improved the performance of the Mach 3.0 operating system by redesigning its internal thread and interprocess communication facilities to use continuations as the basis for control transfer. Compared to previous versions of Mach 3.0, our new system consumes 85% less space per thread. Cross-address space remote procedure calls execute 14% faster. Exception handling runs over 60% faster.

In addition to improving system performance, we have used continuations to generalize many control transfer optimizations that are common to operating systems, and have recast those optimizations in terms of a single implementation methodology. This paper describes our experiences with using continuations in the Mach operating system.