title: Are message queues obsolete in linux?
body: <p>I've been playing with message queues (System V, but POSIX should be ok too) in Linux recently and they seem perfect for my application, but after reading The Art of Unix Programming I'm not sure if they are really a good choice.</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s02.html#id2922148" rel="noreferrer">http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s02.html#id2922148</a></p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The upper, message-passing layer of System V IPC has largely fallen out of use. The lower layer, which consists of shared memory and semaphores, still has significant applications under circumstances in which one needs to do mutual-exclusion locking and some global data sharing among processes running on the same machine. These System V shared memory facilities evolved into the POSIX shared-memory API, supported under Linux, the BSDs, MacOS X and Windows, but not classic MacOS.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s03.html#id2923376" rel="noreferrer">http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s03.html#id2923376</a></p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The System V IPC facilities are present in Linux and other modern Unixes. However, as they are a legacy feature, they are not exercised very often. The Linux version is still known to have bugs as of mid-2003. Nobody seems to care enough to fix them.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Are the System V message queues still buggy in more recent Linux versions? I'm not sure if the author means that POSIX message queues should be ok?</p>
  
  <p>It seems that sockets are the preferred IPC for almost anything(?), but I cannot see how it would be very simple to implement message queues with sockets or something else. Or am I thinking too complexly?</p>
  
  <p>I don't know if it's relevant that I'm working with embedded Linux?</p>