Inter-Process Communication

Each process in the system has its own isolated memory space, if a program has multiple processes running concurrently and there are some data need to be shared/accessed by all the processes, some form of inter-process communication (IPC) has to be done. There are two main problems to be considered for IPC:

• How to pass data between processes
• How to prevent race condition, conflicts between processes while reading/writing shared data. In other words, how to synchronize different processes to work together smoothly.

To addressing the first problem, there are various methods to achieve IPC:

• Network Socket
• Unix Domain Socket
  • bidirectional
• Message Queue
• Named Pipe
  • unidirectional
• Shared Memory
• Message Passing