Shared Memory

The Win32 API uses a special case of file mapping to provide shared memory access between processes. If you specify the system swap file when creating a file-mapping object, the file-mapping object is treated as a shared memory block. Other processes can access the same block of memory by opening the same file-mapping object (see File Mapping). Because shared memory is implemented with file mapping, it supports security access attributes and can operate only between processes running on the same computer.

For information about shared memory, see "General Library" in the "Windows Base Services" section of the Microsoft Platform SDK.