Shared memory and message passing can be combined to provide IPC that offers:
Using message passing, a client sends a request to a server and blocks. The server receives the messages in priority order from clients, processes them, and replies when it can satisfy a request. At this point, the client is unblocked and continues. The very act of sending messages provides natural synchronization between the client and the server. Rather than copy all the data through the message pass, the message can contain a reference to a shared-memory region, so the server could read or write the data directly. This is best explained with a simple example.
Let's assume a graphics server accepts draw image requests from clients and renders them into a frame buffer on a graphics card. Using message passing alone, the client would send a message containing the image data to the server. This would result in a copy of the image data from the client's address space to the server's address space. The server would then render the image and issue a short reply.
If the client didn't send the image data inline with the message, but instead sent a reference to a shared-memory region that contained the image data, then the server could access the client's data directly.
Since the client is blocked on the server as a result of sending it a message, the server knows that the data in shared memory is stable and will not change until the server replies. This combination of message passing and shared memory achieves natural synchronization and very high performance.
This model of operation can also be reversed—the server can generate data and give it to a client. For example, suppose a client sends a message to a server that will read video data directly from a DVD into a shared memory buffer provided by the client. The client will be blocked on the server while the shared memory is being changed. When the server replies and the client continues, the shared memory will be stable for the client to access. This type of design can be pipelined using more than one shared-memory region.
Simple shared memory can't be used between processes on different computers connected via a network. Message passing, on the other hand, is network transparent. A server could use shared memory for local clients and full message passing of the data for remote clients. This allows you to provide a high-performance server that is also network transparent.
In practice, the message-passing primitives are more than fast enough for the majority of IPC needs. The added complexity of a combined approach need only be considered for special applications with very high bandwidth.