Inter-Process communication

Question 1

Shared File Concepts

Answer 1

Processes communicate by reading from and writing to a common file on disk.
Acts as a persistent storage mechanism.

Question 2

What are the key characteristics of files?

Answer 2

Simple to implement.
Slower due to disk I/O overhead.
Synchronization issues may arise if multiple processes access the file simultaneously

Question 3

What are the concepts of shared memory?

Answer 3

Processes communicate by sharing a block of memory in RAM.
Allows extremely fast communication as no disk I/O is involved.

Question 4

What are the shared memory characteristics?

Answer 4

Requires explicit synchronization (e.g., semaphores, mutexes) to manage access.
Non-persistent: Data is lost when the system shuts down or the shared memory segment is deallocated.

Question 5

What are the concepts of sockets?

Answer 5

Processes communicate over a network or within the same machine using socket endpoints.
Suitable for distributed systems or processes on different machines.

Question 6

What are the socket characteristics?

Answer 6

Can be connection-oriented (TCP) or connectionless (UDP).
Works with IP addresses and ports.
Uses system calls like socket(), bind(), listen(), accept(), send(), and recv()