Inter-process communication

Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data between two or more threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one computer or on two or more computers connected by a network. IPC techniques are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being communicated.

IPC may also be referred to as inter-thread communication and inter-application communication.

Implementations

There are a number of APIs which may be used for IPC. A number of platform independent APIs include the following:

Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
Message Bus (MBUS) (specified in RFC 3259)
Anonymous pipes and named pipes
Sockets

The following are platform specific APIs:

Apple Computer's Apple events (previously known as Interapplication Communications (IAC)).
Freedesktop.org's D-BUS
KDE's Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP)
The Mach kernel's Mach Ports
Microsoft's ActiveX, Component Object Model (COM), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), anonymous pipes, named pipes
Novell's SPX
POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
RISC OS's messages
Sun Microsystems's RPC
System V's message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
XML XML-RPC or SOAP
ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE)

Table of IPC Methods:

Method	Provided by (Operating systems or other environments)
File	All operating systems.
Signal	Most operating systems; some systems, such as Windows, only implement signals in the C run-time library and do not actually provide support for their use as an IPC technique.
Socket	Most operating systems.
Pipe	All POSIX systems.
Named pipe	All POSIX systems.
Semaphore	All POSIX systems.
Shared memory	All POSIX systems.
Message passing (shared nothing)	Used in MPI paradigm, Java RMI, CORBA and others.
Memory map	All POSIX systems; may carry race condition risk if a temporary file is used. Windows also supports this technique but the APIs used are platform specific.
Message queue	Most operating systems.
Mailbox	Some operating systems.

External links

Linux System V IPC Man Page

References

Stevens, Richard. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2, Second Edition: Interprocess Communications. Prentice Hall, 1999. ISBN 0130810819

Inter-process communication

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Implementations

See also

External links

References