Inter-process communication

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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 a par with the address space concept, is the foundation for address space independence/isolation.^[1]

1 Implementations
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

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)
Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)
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.

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