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. |
See also
External links
References
- Stevens, Richard. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2, Second Edition: Interprocess Communications. Prentice Hall, 1999. ISBN 0130810819
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