Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

14.1. Introduction

It is often necessary for processes to access common information in order to achieve the goals of the system they comprise. If processes do not share any part of their address spaces, in particular writeable data space, some other approach must be taken. In this chapter we first discuss alternative approaches to providing cross-address-space IPC in general terms, without reference to implementation. Many of the mechanisms are suited to distributed implementation and this major topic is left for Chapter 16. In this chapter, when implementation is discussed, it relates to IPC within a single computer.

A first attempt at a solution might be to put the common data in a file and allow access to the file by a number of processes. ...