Patent ID: 7921423

Claim:
A method for retrieving tasks by a slave application in a system for scheduling and coordinating tasks between a master application and the slave application, the method comprising: determining whether a portion of a memory shared with the master application, designated as a mailbox, has a message including a task to be performed by the slave application, wherein the master application and the slave application using threads to access to the mailbox; retrieving the message when it is present in the mailbox; processing the task to be performed; and sending a response to the task to the mailbox for retrieval by the master application, wherein the determining whether the mailbox has a message further includes: locking the mailbox, to provide mutual exclusion from threads putting messages in the mailbox; determining whether the mailbox has a new message; if there is a new message in the mail box, extracting a task associated with the message, and unlocking the mailbox; if there is no new message in the mailbox, setting a busy wait counter, setting the mailbox state to busy wait state, wherein the mail box is in the busy wait state a thread continues looping and checking for message arrival until the busy wait counter reaches a threshold, and unlock the mailbox.