Pipes represent byte streams. A plain memory block is better if you want to do random accesses, i.e., if it contains a ring buffer or packets that are reused.
Posted Aug 18, 2011 14:11 UTC (Thu) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439)
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No, pipes are supposed to be a general kernel memory (ring) buffer in effect now, which as it happens you can implement a Unix pipe on top of: https://lwn.net/Articles/119682/