Inter-process communication

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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 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.

It is widely accepted that IPC can be implemented significantly faster in a microkernel environment than in classical monolithic kernel systems<ref name="hartig97p74"> Hermann Härtig, Michael Hohmuth, Jochen Liedtke, Sebastian Schönberg, Jean Wolter (October 1997). "The performance of μ-kernel-based systems". Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP), Saint-Malo, France: 74. ISBN 0-89791-916-5. url2</ref>.

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

1 Implementations
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Implementations

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

Anonymous pipes and named pipes
Sockets
Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
Message Bus (MBUS) (specified in RFC 3259)
XML XML-RPC or SOAP
ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE)

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), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), anonymous pipes, named pipes, Local Procedure Call
Novell's SPX
POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
RISC OS's messages
Solaris's Doors
Sun Microsystems' RPC
System V's message queues, semaphores, and shared memory

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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

J. Liedtke, K. Elphinstone, S. Schiinberg, H. Hartig, G. Heiser, N. Islam, T Jaeger (1997). "Achieved IPC Performance". Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VI): 28. ISBN 0-8186-7834-8..
Jochen Liedtke. Improving IPC by kernel design, ACM Press 1994, ISBN 0-89791-632-8
Stevens, Richard. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2, Second Edition: Interprocess Communications. Prentice Hall, 1999. ISBN 0-13-081081-9
Nenad Marovac. "On interprocess interaction in distributed architectures", ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 11(4), 1983