Patent ID: 7779417

Claim:
A method comprising: providing an Application Programming Interface (API) to allow a client to use a client stub to make an inter-process procedure call via the API to a server stub on a server, wherein the client makes the inter-process procedure call as if the client were making a local procedure call via the API, and wherein the inter-process procedure call is made through a shared memory that is allocated for the client at the server; receiving a request, from the client stub through the API to the server stub at the server, to make an inter-process procedure call; allocating, at the server, a section of the shared memory for the inter-process procedure call; acquiring a lock on the section of shared memory; processing the inter-process procedure call at the server, which comprises: retrieving parameters from the section of shared memory for the inter-process procedure call that are stored in the section of shared memory by the client, and storing results of the inter-process procedure call in the section of shared memory; setting a flag to indicate that the server has completed processing the inter-process procedure call; and releasing the lock, wherein the lock is acquired by the client that processes the results of the inter-process procedure call from the section of shared memory in response to acquiring the lock and determining that the flag is set.