Patent ID: 8271996

Claim:
A method for communicating between one or more producers and one or more consumers comprising: registering, by a first consumer of an event queue, for notification regarding occurrences of one or more events; posting, by a producer of the event queue, notification to a plurality of consumers of the event queue regarding one or more occurrences of one or more events, each of said plurality of consumers receiving notification regarding occurrences of events for which said each consumer is registered on a corresponding one of a plurality of event notification lists, said plurality of consumers including said first consumer, said posting including posting a first event notification to said plurality of event notification lists in accordance with a pending policy whereby processing of said producer is blocked if any of the plurality of event notification lists do not have a free entry to post the first event notification, said posting further including: posting, by said producer, said first event notification to a portion of said plurality of event notification lists; and blocking execution of said producer because an event notification list of the first consumer does not have a free entry to post the event notification, wherein said blocking blocks said producer from posting the first event notification to the event notification list and any other remaining ones of the plurality of event notification lists not included in the portion, wherein the event notification list of the first consumer is not included in said portion of said plurality of said event notification lists; retrieving, by said first consumer, posted event notifications regarding events for which said first consumer is registered, wherein, if said first consumer is executing in user space and said event notification list of said plurality of event notification lists to which said event notifications for said first consumer are posted is located in shared memory, said first consumer retrieves said posted event notifications without proxying into kernel space, and wherein if said event notification list of said first consumer is not located in shared memory, said first consumer proxies into kernel space to retrieve said posted event notifications from said event notification list; and wherein said event notification list is implemented using a ring buffer, and wherein said event queue is used by different containers for communicating therebetween, each of said different containers executing in a context of its own address space that is different from address spaces of other containers.