Remote Procedure Calls for Distributed Systems
A thorough introduction to RPC for programmers of distributed systems.
As any programmer knows, procedure calls are a vital software development technique. They provide the leverage necessary for the implementation of all but the most trivial of programs. Remote procedure calls (RPCs) extend the capabilities of conventional procedure calls across a network and are essential to the development of distributed systems. They can be used both for data exchange in distributed file and database systems and for harnessing the power of multiple processors. Linux distributions provide an RPC version derived from the RPC facility developed by the Open Network Computing (ONC) group at Sun Microsystems.
RPC and the Client/Server Model
In case the reader is not familiar with the following terms, we will define them here since they will be important in later discussion: