On Mon, 10 May 1999, Matthias Pfisterer wrote: > To give you a quick shot, a Mach port is an abstraction of a > communication channel between programms. The communication on these > ports follow a message passing model. This means that, in contrary to > communicating by ordinary function calls, the two processes > communicating with each other need not be in the same memory space or on > the same machine. In theory this allows servers to run on different > machines, forming what is called a distributed operating system.
It's using something like remote procedure calls(RPC's) !? > There is another notable thing with (Mach) ports: a single port is not > globally available in the system. It is rather only known to the task > (for now, think of a task being something simular to a process) which > created it and to tasks the port was explicitely passed to by the owner. So we could have thousands of ports ... > Because of this property, ports are used to control the security of the > system: A certain resource or service is available only the tasks which > have ownership or knowledge of a port that is connected with the > resource or service. We could say that each port has something like a userid/groupid associated just like files on Linux, rigth !? Thanks for your help. Best regards, Nuno Carvalho
