Producer–Consumer Synchronization Using IPC

This project implements the classic producer–consumer problem in C using Linux interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The goal is to safely coordinate multiple producer and consumer processes while preventing race conditions, data loss, and duplicate consumption under asynchronous execution conditions.

✨ Features

• Producer–consumer coordination across processes
• Custom semaphore implementation (SSemaphore)
• Message queues for data transfer
• Lock files for mutual exclusion
• Robust handling of concurrent access

🛠️ Technologies Used

• C
• Linux IPC
  • Semaphores
  • Message queues
  • Lock files
• GCC

📁 Project Structure

├── producer_consumer.cxx   # Main producer–consumer implementation
├── SSemaphore.h            # Semaphore interface
├── SSemaphore.cxx          # Semaphore implementation

⚙️ How It Works

• Producers generate data and place it into a shared message queue.
• Consumers retrieve and process data from the queue.
• Semaphores control access to shared resources and enforce ordering.
• Lock files ensure mutual exclusion where required.
• The design prevents:
  • Race conditions
  • Lost messages
  • Duplicate consumption

This implementation emphasizes OS-level synchronization primitives rather than thread-level abstractions.

🧪 Build & Run

Compile using GCC:

g++ producer_consumer.cxx SSemaphore.cxx -o producer_consumer

Run:

./producer_consumer

⚠️ This program is intended to be run on a Linux-based system with IPC support.

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📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

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👤 Author

Hannah G. Simon