Sessions
tutorial | Introduction to basics of TIPC
Jon Maloy
New Brunswick
TIPC (Transparent Inter Process Communication) is a cluster wide IPC service that is specially designed to be used by distributed services and applications. The code consists of a kernel module and a user space configuration tool.
The service provides a location transparent addressing scheme, where logical service instances, rather than interfaces and ports, are the targets of sent messages. Using this scheme, TIPC provides both connection oriented, reliable datagram and multicast communication modes. It also provides a topology subscription server, making it easy to keep continuous track of changes in both functional and physical topology within the cluster.
In this this tutorial we will describe the features, the API, and the architecture of TIPC. We will also show a demo that emphasizes the strengths and the ease of use of this service. Finally, we will describe the improvements we have made both to the protocol and the code over the last couple of years, and outline our fairly ambitious plans for the future (L3 support, scalability, traffic management, performance...)