Deciding Which Message Service to Use

The following comparison will help you decide which APIs to use for your specific application.

Benefits of Using MIPC

The MIPC service provides local communication only. MIPC has the following major benefits:

• MIPC system calls are real-time compliant.

• Messages are exchanged through a zero-copy interface.

• Messages can be allocated and posted from interrupt handlers.

The MIPC service is therefore highly suited to real-time applications.

Benefits of Using IPC

The IPC subsystem provides location-transparent, message-based communication services between applications. Two communication models are provided:

• The RPC model (see the ipcCall(2K) ipcReceive(2K) and ipcReply(2K) man pages).

• Asynchronous communication (see the ipcSend(2K) and ipcReceive(2K) man pages).

Although the IPC service implements fine-grained locking policies (which makes its services highly preemptable) it cannot enforce real-time constraints. IPC services are therefore intended specifically for distributed applications.