| WP1 - RTOS State of the Art Analysis: Deliverable D1.1 - RTOS Analysis | ||
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One of the main communications paradigms used in realtime applications is shared memory.
Linux processes can share memory with each other and with drivers the POSIX.1b call mmap(). This function can be used both, to map into main memory a regular file and to map shared memory objects. When multiple processes map the same memory object (or file), they share access to the underlying data, which is a efficient way to communicate large amounts of data between processed.
Since version 2.4.x and glibc 2.2 (GNU "C" library), Linux provides open shared memory objects, which is part of the POSIX realtime extensions. This API has the following functions: shm_open() and shm_unlink().