Linux IPC: Lost between Threading and Networking (asg2025)

Communication is paramount in modern application development. This applies equally well to the process of writing applications and to the code itself. The complexity of the tasks ahead of us calls for a distributed and coordinated development effort, and this often manifests in our code: We design distributed, communicating systems to split complexity and responsibility among many people and teams, and at the same time meet the demand for ever faster systems. The last decade showed significantly increased popularity in API design, network protocols, and distributed computations. At the same time some of the most intriguing language research improves how multi-threaded applications synchronize and exchange information without sacrificing safety or performance. Between these two lies an almost forgotten world: Linux Inter-process communication (IPC) has lost ground to thread-communication and networking protocols. Let us look at how other operating systems have evolved their IPC layers, what new systems decide to go with, and why Linux IPC has not seen any major changes since the 90s. And finally, can we lift Linux IPC out of stagnation and catch up with everyone else? Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/8WW7YH/