Summary

This chapter presented an overview of interprocess communications in Linux. We discussed the usage of the ipcs command for gathering information about the IPC resources loaded on a system and provided several examples of how to use ipcs. We described the three types of IPC facilitiessemaphores, message queues, and shared memory segmentsand examined the parameters associated with each type of facility. In some cases, we provided a recommended setting for a particular parameter. The chapter also discussed how to dynamically or statically modify the configurable IPC parameters, and provided examples of how to use /proc and sysctl to modify dynamic parameters. Finally, we discussed the role of pipes in interprocess communication.