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by jeroenhd 961 days ago
That's something that comes up more often, because many feel this shouldn't be in the kernel in the first place. The problem is that there hasn't been a proper userspace alternative with similar performance characteristics.

I think putting this stuff in the kernel is rather silly, but I'd rather have it in the kernel than bring back the rift between Android and Linux.

2 comments

"similar performance characteristics"? I can exchange data at a quarter of the latency using normal shared memory.
I'm not sure how you'd port binder's security guarantees to simple shared memory. Binder is more than just IPC, it also provides an RPC mechanism as well as some isolation capabilities.
I'm sure it does more things that make it useful, and that it provides a practical programming model for certain platforms, but it's certainly not the lowest latency way to do inter-process communication.
Does the isolation between processes in Android require that it be in the kernel or can some other form of privilege bridge the separation?