Inter-process communication

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In computing, inter-process communication (IPC) is a set of methods for the exchange of data among multiple threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC methods 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. There are several reasons for providing an environment that allows process cooperation: Information sharing Computational speedup Modularity Convenience Privilege separation IPC may also be referred to as inter-thread communication and inter-application communication. The combination of IPC with the address space concept is the foundation for address space independence/isolation.[1]

Contents
1 Main IPC methods 2 Implementations 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Main IPC methods

Method File

Short Description

Provided by (operating systems or other environments)

A record stored on disk that can be accessed Most operating systems by name by any process A system message sent from one process to another, not usually used to store information but instead give commands. A data stream sent over a network interface, either to a different process on the same computer or to another computer Most operating systems; some systems, such as Windows, implement signals in only the C run-time library and provide no support for their use as an IPC method[citation needed ] Most operating systems

Signal

Socket Message queue Pipe Named pipe Semaphore Shared memory Message passing (shared nothing) Memorymapped file

An anonymous data stream similar to the pipe, Most operating systems but stores and retrieves information in packets. A two-way data stream interfaced through standard input and output and is read character by character. A pipe implemented through a file on the file system instead of standard input and output. All POSIX systems, Windows All POSIX systems, Windows

A simple structure that synchronizes threads or All POSIX systems, Windows processes acting on shared resources. Multiple processes given access to the same memory, allowing all to change it and read changes made by other processes. Similar to the message queue. All POSIX systems, Windows

Used in MPI paradigm, Java RMI, CORBA, DDS, MSMQ, MailSlots, QNX, others

A file mapped to RAM and can be modified by changing memory addresses directly instead All POSIX systems, Windows of outputting to a stream, shares same benefits as a standard file.

Implementations
There are several APIs which may be used for IPC. A number of platform independent APIs include the following: Anonymous pipes and named pipes Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) Freedesktop.org's D-Bus Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) Message Bus (Mbus) (specified in RFC 3259)

MCAPI Multicore Communications API Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (http://code.google.com/p/lcm/) (LCM) ONC RPC Unix domain sockets XML XML-RPC or SOAP JSON JSON-RPC Thrift TIPC ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE) MQ The following are platform or programming language specific APIs: Apple Computer's Apple events (previously known as Interapplication Communications (IAC)). Enea's LINX for Linux (open source) and various DSP and general purpose processors under OSE IPC (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ipc/) implementation from CMU. Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) KDE's Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP) - Now deprecated. D-Bus is used instead. Libt2n for C++ under Linux only, handles complex objects and exceptions The Mach kernel's Mach Ports Microsoft's ActiveX, Component Object Model (COM), Microsoft Transaction Server (COM+), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), anonymous pipes, named pipes, Local Procedure Call, MailSlots, Message loop, MSRPC, .NET Remoting, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Novell's SPX PHP's sessions POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and Shared memory RISC OS's messages Solaris Doors System V's message queues, semaphores, and shared memory Distributed Ruby DIPC Distributed Inter-Process Communication OpenBinder Open binder IPC Shared Memory Messaging (http://www.solacesystems.com/solutions/messaging-middleware/ipcshared-memory-messaging) from Solace Systems QNX's PPS (Persistant Publish/Subscribe) service SIMPL The Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux (SIMPL)

See also
Computer network programming Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP paradigm) Data Distribution Service .NET Remoting Microkernel

Nanokernel Protected procedure call

References
1. ^ Jochen Liedtke. On -Kernel Construction (http://i30www.ira.uka.de/research/publications/papers/index.php? lid=en&docid=642), Proc. 15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), December 1995

Stevens, Richard. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2, Second Edition: Interprocess Communications. Prentice Hall, 1999. ISBN 0-13-081081-9 U. Ramachandran, M. Solomon, M. Vernon Hardware support for interprocess communication (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=30371&coll=portal&dl=ACM) Proceedings of the 14th annual international symposium on Computer architecture. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Pages: 178 188. Year of Publication: 1987 ISBN 0-8186-0776-9 Crovella, M. Bianchini, R. LeBlanc, T. Markatos, E. Wisniewski, R. Using communication-tocomputation ratio in parallel program designand performance prediction (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=242738) 14 December 1992. pp. 238245 ISBN 0-8186-3200-3

External links
Linux ipc(5) man page (http://www.wlug.org.nz/ipc(5)) describing System V IPC Windows IPC (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365574(VS.85).aspx) Beej's Guide to Unix IPC (http://beej.us/guide/bgipc/) Unix Network Programming (Vol 2: Interprocess Communications) (http://www.yendor.com/programming/unix/unp/unp.html) by W. Richard Stevens Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inter-process_communication&oldid=565098429" Categories: Inter-process communication This page was last modified on 20 July 2013 at 20:30. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.