2.10. Interprocess Communication and Synchronization

A running Linux system consists of numerous processes, many of which operate independently of each other. Some processes, however, cooperate to achieve their intended purposes, and these processes need methods of communicating with one another and synchronizing their actions.

One way for processes to communicate is by reading and writing information in disk files. However, for many applications, this is too slow and inflexible. Therefore, Linux, like all modern UNIX implementations, provides a rich set of mechanisms for interprocess communication (IPC), including the following: