Inter-process communication
Sharing of data between running processes in a computer system
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Through Computer science, Process and Operating system
IPC is very important to the design process for microkernels and nanokernels, which reduce the number of functionalities provided by the kernel. Those functionalities are then obtained by messaging with IPC servers (specialized coordination application), leading to a large increase in communication when compared to a regular monolithic kernel (central, with less spawn independent processes). IPC interfaces generally encompass variable analytic framework structures. This IPCs methods ensure compatibility between the multi-vector protocols upon which IPC models rely.
An IPC mechanism is either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronization primitives may be used to have synchronous behavior with an asynchronous IPC mechanism.
Disadvantages
Merging data from two processes can often incur significantly higher costs compared to processing the same data on a single thread, potentially by two or more orders of magnitude due to overheads such as inter-process communication and synchronization.
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Approaches
Different IPC approaches are tailored to different process requirements (inside an application), such as performance, modularity, and system circumstances such as network bandwidth (an optimal consideration, but depends on the application distribution) and latency (general cost and density of generating and processing requests).
Applications
Remote procedure call interfaces
- Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
- ONC RPC
- XML-RPC or SOAP
- JSON-RPC
- Message Bus (Mbus) (specified in RFC 3259) (not to be confused with M-Bus)
- .NET Remoting
- gRPC
Platform communication stack
The following are messaging, and information systems that utilize IPC mechanisms but don't implement IPC themselves:
- KDE's Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP) – deprecated by D-Bus
- D-Bus
- OpenWrt uses ubus micro bus architecture
- MCAPI Multicore Communications API
- SIMPL The Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux (SIMPL)
- 9P (Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol)
- Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
- Thrift
- ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE)
- ØMQ
- YAMI4
- Enlightenment_(software) E16 uses eesh as an IPC
Operating system communication stack
The following are platform or programming language-specific APIs:
- Apple Computer's Apple events, previously known as Interapplication Communications (IAC)
- ARexx ports
- Enea's LINX for Linux (open source) and various DSP and general-purpose processors under OSE
- 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
- POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
- RISC OS's messages
- Solaris Doors
- System V's message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
- Linux Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC)
- OpenBinder Open binder
- QNX's PPS (Persistent Publish/Subscribe) service
Distributed object models
The following are platform or programming language specific-APIs that use IPC, but do not themselves implement it: