Abstract
A description is given of the design for a universal and reliable set of interprocess communication (IPC) services in the UNIX 4. 2BSD environment. The universal IPC services include one-to-one and multicast send, asynchronous and synchronous communication; blocking and non-blocking receive commands; and group manipulation. The networking facility in UNIX 4. 2BSD provides users with direct access to the transport layer, which provides rudimentary IPC services. The lack of a universal set of IPC services in UNIX 4. 2BSD makes the development of distributed algorithms and distributed programming languages difficult. The authors consider the design of universal IPC services to be session layer services which provide services to the distributed application layer and require rudimentary IPC services from the transport layer. The proposed set of IPC primitives provides reliable service and is implemented in a networked SUN workstations.