Shared Memory

The fastest way for processes to communicate is directly, through a shared segment of memory. A common memory area is added to the address space of sharing processes. Applications use stores to send data and fetches to receive communicated data. SunOS 5.0 through 5.8 provides three mechanisms for shared memory: memory mapped files, described in "Memory Management Interfaces", System V IPC shared memory, and POSIX shared memory.

The major difficulty with shared memory is that results can be wrong when more than two processes are trying to read and write in it at the same time. See "Shared Memory Synchronization" for more information.

Memory Mapped Files

The mmap(2) interface connects a shared memory segment to the caller's address space. The caller specifies the shared segment by address and length. The caller must also specify access protection flags and how the mapped pages are managed. mmap(2) can also be used to map a file or a segment of a file to a process's memory. This technique is very convenient in some applications, but it is easy to forget that any store to the mapped file segment results in implicit I/O. This can make an otherwise bounded process have unpredictable response times. msync(3C) forces immediate or eventual copies of the specified memory segment to its permanent storage location(s). See "Memory Management Interfaces" for more information.

Fileless Memory Mapping

The zero special file, /dev/zero(4S), can be used to create an unnamed, zero initialized memory object. The length of the memory object is the least number of pages that contain the mapping. The object can be shared only by descendants of a common ancestor process.

System V IPC Shared Memory

A shmget(2) call can be used to create a shared memory segment or to obtain an existing shared memory segment. shmget(2) returns an identifier that is analogous to a file identifier. A call to shmat(2) makes the shared memory segment a virtual segment of the process memory much like mmap(2). See "System V Shared Memory".

POSIX Shared Memory

POSIX shared memory is a variation of System V shared memory and provides similar capabilities with some minor variations. See "POSIX Shared Memory" for more information.

Shared Memory Synchronization

In sharing memory, a portion of memory is mapped into the address space of one or more processes. No method of coordinating access is automatically provided, so nothing prevents two processes from writing to the shared memory at the same time in the same place. So, it is typically used with semaphores or another mechanism used to synchronize processes. System V and POSIX semaphores both can be used for this purpose. Mutual exclusion locks, reader/writer locks, semaphores, and conditional variables provided in the multithread library can also be used for this purpose.