Systems and methods to implement posix compliant cluster fifo with coupling device

摘要

A coupling device for communication between operating systems in a cluster has a number of FIFO queues. The operating systems have an application programming interface which uses Posix pipe semantics to read from and write to the queues. The coupling device maintains the data structures and locks needed to represent Posix pipes. This allows the use of standard mount, open, write, read and close function calls to the operating system kernel to be used to access the FIFO queues on the coupling device. If one of the operating systems connected to the coupling device crashes, the device repairs the data structures associated with the queues. The operating systems may run on a single computer system or may be distributed across several computer systems.