US 7,607,142 B2Granted

Cancellation mechanism for cooperative systems

AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation

InventorsJose M. Bernabeu-Auban, Jeff L. Havens, Yousef A. Khalidi

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Abstract

Object invocation may be carried out by one thread in a service which may include multiple executing threads. In a mechanism for implementing a cancellation operation in a cooperative system, a thread identifies an operation to be cancelled. A cancel function has an argument comprising the thread identifier in which the operation is to be cancelled. The cancel function is called by a client process thread to cancel a pending object invocation initiated by the client process. An immediate or hard cancel causes the targeted client and cancel thread to return immediately. A discretionary or soft cancel does not affect the targeted client thread. In either case the server process is notified via a maintenance notification. The target thread of the cancel cannot be reused for other work until the cancel request or notification has returned.

Claims18

Dependent claims

An inter-process cancellation system comprising a processor operatively coupled to a computer readable storage medium including computer executable instructions that, when executed, cause the system to carry out the following method:

executing a client process to send a message invoking an operation on an object in a server process, using a first client thread;
executing the server process;
invoking a cancel operation on the first client thread using a second client thread to cancel the operation invoked using the first client thread;
initiating a first server thread of the server process to perform the operation on the object;
initiating the cancelling of the operation to be performed by the first server thread in the server process using a second server thread as a result of invoking the cancel operation;
determining a state of the first server thread via the second server thread as a result of initiating the cancelling of the operation;
and
using a trusted entity to facilitate the sending of the message and invocation of the cancel operation and to maintain a client process table and a server process table, wherein the client process table comprises at least one client thread identifier identifying the first client thread in the client process and the object invoked by the first client thread, and the server process table comprises at least one server thread identifier identifying the first server thread in the server process and the object invoked by the client thread.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.