XPC: architectural support for secure and efficient cross process call

Microkernel has many intriguing features like security, fault-tolerance, modularity and customizability, which recently stimulate a resurgent interest in both academia and industry (including seL4, QNX and Google's Fuchsia OS). However, IPC (inter-process communication), which is known as the Achilles' Heel of microkernels, is still the major factor for the overall (poor) OS performance. Besides, IPC also plays a vital role in monolithic kernels like Android Linux, as mobile applications frequently communicate with plenty of user-level services through IPC. Previous software optimizations of IPC usually cannot bypass the kernel which is responsible for domain switching and message copying/remapping; hardware solutions like tagged memory or capability replace page tables for isolation, but usually require non-trivial modification to existing software stack to adapt the new hardware primitives. In this paper, we propose a hardware-assisted OS primitive, XPC (Cross Process Call), for fast and secure synchronous IPC. XPC enables direct switch between IPC caller and callee without trapping into the kernel, and supports message passing across multiple processes through the invocation chain without copying. The primitive is compatible with the traditional address space based isolation mechanism and can be easily integrated into existing microkernels and monolithic kernels. We have implemented a prototype of XPC based on a Rocket RISC-V core with FPGA boards and ported two microkernel implementations, seL4 and Zircon, and one monolithic kernel implementation, Android Binder, for evaluation. We also implement XPC on GEM5 simulator to validate the generality. The result shows that XPC can reduce IPC call latency from 664 to 21 cycles, up to 54.2x improvement on Android Binder, and improve the performance of real-world applications on microkernels by 1.6x on Sqlite3 and 10x on an HTTP server with minimal hardware resource cost.