1.1. Leveraging Fast DDS SHM in Docker deployments

By default, Fast DDS enables both a Shared Memory Transport and Data-sharing delivery (when the configuration allows it, see Constraints). The way Fast DDS utilizes to find out whether a remote DomainParticipant is running on the same host as the local one is through a hashing of the network interfaces, which entails that two Docker container which are not sharing the same network stack will be detected as two different hosts, and therefore Fast DDS will defer to communicating through the UDP Transport instead.

To enable the use of both the Shared Memory Transport and Data-sharing in Docker deployments, two additional options need to be passed to the docker run command, those are:

• –network=host: This option shares the host’s network stack with the containers, and therefore Fast DDS will be able to identify them as the same host.

• –ipc=host: This option shares the host’s shared memory mechanism with the containers. Without it, Fast DDS will identify both containers as the same host, but since they will have separate shared memory spaces, they will not be able to communicate with one another. The use of this option is the Docker recommended way of sharing shared memory between containers, in opposition of for instance sharing the /dev/shm volume in Linux machines. A more advanced user could set the flag to shared, thus sharing the shared memory mechanism of one of the container with the others.

docker run -it --rm --network=host --ipc=host [OPTIONS] <docker-image>