Transparent Inter-process Communication

The TIPC project also provides open source implementations of the protocol for other operating systems including Wind River's VxWorks and Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Datagram messages are discrete data units between 1 and 66,000 byte of length, transmitted between non-connected sockets.

The most distinguishing property of TIPC connections is still their ability to react promptly to loss of contact with the peer socket, without resorting to active neighbor heart-beating.

Nodes can be either physical processors, virtual machines or network namespaces, e.g., in the form of Docker Containers.

All nodes having the same cluster identity will establish links to each other, provided the network is set up to allow mutual neighbor discovery between them.

Since Linux 4.7, TIPC comes with a unique, patent pending, auto-adaptive hierarchical neighbor monitoring algorithm.

The TIPC team is currently studying how to add GSO/GRO support for intra node messaging, in order to match TCP even here.

While designed to be able to use all kinds of transport media, as of May 2018[update] implementations support UDP, Ethernet and InfiniBand.

The VxWorks implementation also supports shared memory which can be accessed by multiple instances of the operating system, running simultaneously on the same hardware.

This protocol was originally developed by Jon Paul Maloy at Ericsson during 1996–2005 and was used by that company in cluster applications for several years, before subsequently being released to the open source community and integrated in the mainstream Linux kernel.

It has since then undergone numerous improvements and upgrades, all performed by a dedicated TIPC project team with participants from various companies.