Things get a little trickier when you're using kernel timeouts with message passing. Recall from the Message Passing chapter (in the “Message passing and client/server” part) that the server may or may not be waiting for a message when the client sends it. This means that the client could be blocked in either the SEND-blocked state (if the server hasn't received the message yet), or the REPLY-blocked state (if the server has received the message, and hasn't yet replied). The implication here is that you should specify both blocking states for the flags argument to TimerTimeout(), because the client might get blocked in either state.
To specify multiple states, you simply OR them together:
TimerTimeout (… _NTO_TIMEOUT_SEND | _NTO_TIMEOUT_REPLY, …);
This causes the timeout to be active whenever the kernel enters either the SEND-blocked state or the REPLY-blocked state. There's nothing special about entering the SEND-blocked state and timing out—the server hasn't received the message yet, so the server isn't actively doing anything on behalf of the client. This means that if the kernel times out a SEND-blocked client, the server doesn't have to be informed. The client's MsgSend() function returns an ETIMEDOUT indication, and processing has completed for the timeout.
However, as was mentioned in the Message Passing chapter (under “_NTO_CHF_UNBLOCK”), if the server has already received the client's message, and the client wishes to unblock, there are two choices for the server. If the server has not specified _NTO_CHF_UNBLOCK on the channel it received the message on, then the client will be unblocked immediately, and the server won't receive any indication that an unblock has occurred. Most of the servers I've seen always have the _NTO_CHF_UNBLOCK flag enabled. In that case, the kernel delivers a pulse to the server, but the client remains blocked until the server replies! As mentioned in the above-referenced section of the Message Passing chapter, this is done so that the server has an indication that it should do something about the client's unblock request.