Shared memory and IPC

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

the only tricky bit is, and this is relevant i should
imagine to doing shared, complex data structures in samba,
an also a possible solution to some of the issues
in APR, how do you guarantee that multiple processes -
no, _all_ processes - get access to the same fixed address
memory segment / segments?

i wasn't aware that mmap could do fixed memory segments,
otherwise i would have suggested (on apr dev) an sms_shmem
that used shared memory.

[fyi: sms - Smart Memory system.  it's a wrapper around
memory management that presents the same API to mlock()ed,
mmap()ed, kernel-page-mapped, etc. memory, that has
support for either malloc/realloc/free style or pool-style
such as Trivial Alloc and APR pools management].

a few months back or so, doing an sms_shmem was considered
[with a view to then presenting that via an apr_pool_t
interface]

however, the trouble with shared memory is [was!] that
the offsets in the different processes for the shared
memory segment are different.

so, placing a linked list or any data structures with
pointers in it is a waste of time.

now, i know that in samba there are shmem-start-relative
linked lists to data structures *without* pointers in
them., so i know this can be done.

and doing a linked list in MAP_FIXED segments would
be an awful lot easier, in fact it would be trivial.

the only thing, then, that is of concern, is how to link
several segments together: it's not a good idea to
mmap a massive segment of memory, have to do several
smaller ones.

what happens if you run out and have to get some more
MMAP_FIXED segments?  how do you guarantee that all
processes will all successfully mmap the same shared
memory segment at the same address?  how do you
communicate the _need_ to get more MMAPED_FIXED
segments to all processes? :)

[please, someone tell me if i am explaining this clearly enough]

or, should the first implementation avoid this by
specifying the required segment size at apr_initialise()
time or as a parameter to apr_sms_shmem_create()?

luke

On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 12:37:27PM -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> > is it possible to get memory allocated in one process to be shared
> > with another process *at the same address* on unix, os/2, nt, vms etc?
> 
> mmap has the MAP_FIXED flag that forces the mmap to fail
> if it can't be done at the given address. You could use
> a different IPC method to pass that address to other
> processes.
> 
> This is UNIX/POSIX only though (as far as I know).
> 
> Jeremy.
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