Inter-process communication - Wikipedia

Inter-process communication

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In computer science, inter-process communication (IPC) is the sharing of data between running processes in a computer system, or between multiple such systems. Mechanisms for IPC may be provided by an operating system. Applications which use IPC are often categorized as using clients and servers, where the client process requests data and the server process responds to client requests.1.

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.2

An IPC mechanism is either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronization primitives may be used to have synchronous behavior with an asynchronous IPC mechanism.

Printed 2026-10-13.

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Footnotes

  1. “Interprocess Communications”. ↩

  2. “Inter-process communications for system-level design”. International Workshop on Hardware/Software Codesign. ↩