[GTALUG] "Massage Passing" library?

Hi all, I'm looking for keywords to search for... I have various local peripherals that I need to read and write. From top of my head, I'm thinking 3 ways: 1. Use select(2) (and friends) to round-robin the peripherals. 2. Each peripheral is serviced by a separate thread, and main thread does the business logics. The peripherals don't need to talk to each other (but this may change). 3. Each peripheral is serviced by a separate process, and they pass "messages". This option is what I want to investigate. So, do you know any "message-passing" scheme, framework, or library that I can look up? I'm not talking about OS or kernel level. More at application level. -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> .