Is it possible to use shared memory as IPC on ROS2 foxy?

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As for fastdds, since version 2.3.4 shm_transport is the default transport layer in intral-machine communication, so you don't need any configurations. see https://fast-dds.docs.eprosima.com/en...

There is the zero_copy transport layer provided for better performance, see this https://fast-dds.docs.eprosima.com/en...

for general usage for zero-copy transport with rmw_fastrtps, you can try with this repo, https://github.com/ZhenshengLee/ros2_...

thanks.

Ok, so by aggregating comments from Miguel and Lukic, I successfully validate that DDS can be used with foxy.

To do so, you have to create an XML file called for example shm_profile.xml which will contains :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<profiles xmlns="http://www.eprosima.com/XMLSchemas/fastRTPS_Profiles">
    <transport_descriptors>
        <!-- Create a descriptor for the new transport -->
        <transport_descriptor>
            <transport_id>shm_transport</transport_id>
            <type>SHM</type>
        </transport_descriptor>
    </transport_descriptors>

    <participant profile_name="SHMParticipant" is_default_profile="true">
        <rtps>
            <!-- Link the Transport Layer to the Participant -->
            <userTransports>
                <transport_id>shm_transport</transport_id>
            </userTransports>
        </rtps>
    </participant>
</profiles>

Then, if you export the two environments variables :

export FASTRTPS_DEFAULT_PROFILES_FILE=`pwd`/shm_profile.xml RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_fastrtps_cpp

When you run two nodes that communicate on the same computer, you can observe in Wireshark that there are really few RTSP messages.

Now we can do latency, and bandwidth measurement, but that's another story !