Solaris™ Internals: Core Kernel Components

10.4. System V Message Queues

Message queues provide a means for processes to send and receive messages of various size in an asynchronous fashion on a Solaris system. As with the other IPC facilities, the initial call when message queues are used is an ipcget call, in this case, msgget(2). The msgget(2) system call takes a key value and some flags as arguments and returns an identifier for the message queue. Once the message queue has been established, it's simply a matter of sending and receiving messages. Applications use msgsnd(2) and msgrcv(2) for those purposes. The sender simply constructs the message, assigns a message type, and calls msgsnd(2). The system will place the message on the appropriate message queue until a msgrcv(2) is successfully ...