The Design And Implementation Of Inter-process Communication In Minix

Inter-process communication (IPC) is an importance and necessary primitive in the operating system. It provides the mechanism to communicate between several different isolated processes. Minix 3 is a new operating system revised and rewritten heavily from its previous version. It's a rapidly developing micro-kernel operating system. However, it is still on its way to be a fully POSIX-compliant system. The lack of the features of IPC hinders developers from porting useful programs which take advantage of IPC from other platforms and complicates the co-operation of multi-process development on this platform.This article is based on the co-operation with Vrije University in Amsterdam. In this project, we designed and developed the fully compliant-POSIX inter-process communication system in Minix 3. This article elaborates on the design and implementation of this system showing a right way to design a syntactic inter-process communication system on micro-kernel based operating system. Besides, this article also compares with other popular operating system on how this sub-system is designed.Shared memory is one kind of inter-process communication. It is the fastest way of exchanging data with different processes. Each process is able to access the block of shared memory as its own address simultaneously. Semaphore is another mechanism of IPC discussed in this article. It provides the effective primitive synchronization under the same framework as the shared memory.With the design of the IPC framework, more functionalities and primitives can be added without much trouble. The features of a micro-kernel system and its user-space service give much room for such a research on the design and implementation of inter-process communication.