Solaris™ Internals: Core Kernel Components

10.2. System V Shared Memory

Shared memory provides an extremely efficient means of sharing data between multiple processes on a Solaris system, since the data need not actually be moved from one process's address space to another. As the name implies, shared memory is exactly that: the sharing of the same physical memory (RAM) pages by multiple processes, such that each process has mappings to the same physical pages and can access the memory through pointer dereferencing in code. The use of shared memory in an application requires implementation of just a few interfaces bundled into the standard C language library, /usr/lib/libc.so, as listed in Table 10-3. Consult the manual pages for more detailed information. In the following sections, we ...