Shared states

As with threads, we can have some shared states between processes. The only difference is that the threads are able to access the same memory space owned by their owner process, but processes cannot have that luxury. Therefore, other mechanisms should be employed to share a state among a number of processes.

In this section, we are going to discuss these techniques and as part of this chapter, we focus on some of them that function as storage. In the first section, we will be discussing different techniques and trying to group them based on their nature.

Sharing techniques

If you look at the ways you can share a state (a variable or an array) between two processes, it turns out that it can be done in a limited number of ways. Theoretically, there are two main categories of sharing a state between a number of processes, but in a real computer system, each of these categories has some subcategories.

You either have to put a state in a "place"...