A measurement-based study of hardware support for object invocation

The object invocation paradigm is attractive for structuring distributed systems. Distributed object-based operating systems view the resources of the system as a collection of objects. Object invocation is the primary mechanism in such systems, and is often used as a yardstick for measuring the system performance. However, existing systems of this flavour exhibit poor performance due to the mismatch between the requirements of the object invocation mechanism and the machine architecture. Through measurements of an existing object-based kernel, we present a breakdown of the costs involved in implementing the object invocation mechanism. The measurements suggest architectural solutions to improve the performance of such systems. We present our preliminary studies towards providing hardware support for the object invocation mechanism.