Inter-process communication
 |
 | It has been suggested that Inter-application connection be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since August 2007. |
Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data among 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.
IPC may also be referred to as inter-thread communication and inter-application communication.
IPC, on pair with the address space concept, is the foundation for address space independence/isolation.[1]
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
- Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
- Freedesktop.org's D-Bus
- Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
- Message Bus (MBUS) (specified in RFC 3259)
- ONC RPC
- Sockets
- XML XML-RPC or SOAP
- TIPC
- ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE)
The following are platform or programming language specific APIs:
- Apple Computer's Apple events (previously known as Interapplication Communications (IAC)).
- KDE's Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP)
- 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, Message loop, MSRPC, .NET Remoting and Windows Communication Foundation
- Novell's SPX
- POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and Shared memory
- RISC OS's messages
- Solaris's Doors
- System V's message queues, semaphores, and Shared memory
- Distributed Ruby
- DIPC Distributed Inter-Process Communication
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-mapped file | 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
- Computer network programming
- Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP paradigm)
- .NET Remoting
- Microkernel
- Nanokernel
- Protected procedure call
References
- ^ Jochen Liedtke. On µ-Kernel Construction, 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 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-to-computation ratio in parallel program designand performance prediction 1-4 December 1992. pp. 238-245 ISBN 0-8186-3200-3