Shared Memory C & Python IPC

I had a problem whereby I needed to use a C program to capture video, in this case RaspiVid (the raspberry pi camera capture program), but I wanted to sync the video with data being capture by a Python program; in order to get the sync right I need to grab data about the video capture as it was running.

To do this I had to find a method of doing Inter Process Communication (IPC), very quickly, with a very low performance impact on the C program.  I explored several IPC options between C and Python (stdin/stdout, named pipes, tcp, shared memory) and found that using Shared Memory was the only way to deliver the performance I needed.

I pulled together a quick proof of concept to learn the basics.

C - Writing to Shared Memory
I created a C program which writes data into a shared memory segment and then waits (to allow me time to run the python program to read it out).  See http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node27.html for a description of how to use shared memory and this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPxcOwMmpnw for a tutorial.

shmwriter.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>
#include <sys/shm.h>

int main(int argc, const char **argv)
{
   int shmid;
   // give your shared memory an id, anything will do
   key_t key = 123456;
   char *shared_memory;

   // Setup shared memory, 11 is the size
   if ((shmid = shmget(key, 11, IPC_CREAT | 0666)) < 0)
   {
      printf("Error getting shared memory id");
      exit(1);
   }
   // Attached shared memory
   if ((shared_memory = shmat(shmid, NULL, 0)) == (char *) -1)
   {
      printf("Error attaching shared memory id");
      exit(1);
   }
   // copy "hello world" to shared memory
   memcpy(shared_memory, "Hello World", sizeof("Hello World"));
   // sleep so there is enough time to run the reader!
   sleep(10);
   // Detach and remove shared memory
   shmdt(shmid);
   shmctl(shmid, IPC_RMID, NULL);
}

Compile using:

gcc -o shmwriter shmwriter.c

Python - Reading from Shared Memory
I found a great module for python, sysv_ipc, which greatly simplifies the interaction with shared memory, see http://semanchuk.com/philip/sysv_ipc/ for more information, download and install instructions.

shmreader.py

import sysv_ipc

# Create shared memory object
memory = sysv_ipc.SharedMemory(123456)

# Read value from shared memory
memory_value = memory.read()

# Find the 'end' of the string and strip
i = memory_value.find('\0')
if i != -1:
    memory_value = memory_value[:i]

print memory_value

Run using:

python shmreader.py

You can download the code from github, https://github.com/martinohanlon/c_python_ipc.git.