Inter-process communication

From Free net encyclopedia

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.

1 Implementations
2 See also
3 External links
4 References

[edit]

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; and 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); 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; and ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE).

Table of IPC Methods:

Method	Provided by (Operating Systems or other environments)
File	All operating systems
Signal	All operating systems
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
Message queue	Most operating systems
Mailbox	Some operating systems