4.1. Interprocess Communication

See also

Example: Printing using a pipe to the child process

Examples of interprocess and interthread communication facilities includes:

• Data transfer:

  • Pipes (named, dynamic – shell or process generated)
  • shared buffers or files
  • TCP/IP socket communication (named, dynamic - loop back interface or network interface)
  • D-Bus is an IPC mechanism offering one to many broadcast and subscription facilities between processes. Among other uses, it is used by graphical frameworks such as KDE and GNOME. See the wiki.

• Shared memory

  • Between Processes
  • Between Threads (global memory)

• Messages

  • OS provided message passing:

    send() / receive() – see Microkernels

  • Signals

  • Via locks, semaphores or monitors

Contents

• 4.1.1. Handling Signals
• 4.1.2. Potential Interprocess Communication Problems
  • 4.1.2.1. Starvation
  • 4.1.2.2. Deadlock
  • 4.1.2.3. Data Inconsistency
  • 4.1.2.4. Shared Buffer Problem