@@ -4,10 +4,125 @@
Linux Kernel TIPC
=================
-TIPC (Transparent Inter Process Communication) is a protocol that is
-specially designed for intra-cluster communication.
+Introduction
+============
-For more information about TIPC, see http://tipc.sourceforge.net.
+TIPC (Transparent Inter Process Communication) is a protocol that is specially
+designed for intra-cluster communication. It can be configured to transmit
+messages either on UDP or directly across Ethernet. Message delivery is
+sequence guaranteed, loss free and flow controlled. Latency times are shorter
+than with any other known protocol, while maximal throughput is comparable to
+that of TCP.
+
+TIPC Features
+-------------
+
+- Cluster wide IPC service
+
+ Have you ever wished you had the convenience of Unix Domain Sockets even when
+ transmitting data between cluster nodes? Where you yourself determine the
+ addresses you want to bind to and use? Where you don't have to perform DNS
+ lookups and worry about IP addresses? Where you don't have to start timers
+ to monitor the continuous existence of peer sockets? And yet without the
+ downsides of that socket type, such as the risk of lingering inodes?
+
+ Welcome to the Transparent Inter Process Communication service, TIPC in short,
+ which gives you all of this, and a lot more.
+
+- Service Addressing
+
+ A fundamental concept in TIPC is that of Service Addressing which makes it
+ possible for a programmer to chose his own address, bind it to a server
+ socket and let client programs use only that address for sending messages.
+
+- Service Tracking
+
+ A client wanting to wait for the availability of a server, uses the Service
+ Tracking mechanism to subscribe for binding and unbinding/close events for
+ sockets with the associated service address.
+
+ The service tracking mechanism can also be used for Cluster Topology Tracking,
+ i.e., subscribing for availability/non-availability of cluster nodes.
+
+ Likewise, the service tracking mechanism can be used for Cluster Connectivity
+ Tracking, i.e., subscribing for up/down events for individual links between
+ cluster nodes.
+
+- Transmission Modes
+
+ Using a service address, a client can send datagram messages to a server socket.
+
+ Using the same address type, it can establish a connection towards an accepting
+ server socket.
+
+ It can also use a service address to create and join a Communication Group,
+ which is the TIPC manifestation of a brokerless message bus.
+
+ Multicast with very good performance and scalability is available both in
+ datagram mode and in communication group mode.
+
+- Inter Node Links
+
+ Communication between any two nodes in a cluster is maintained by one or two
+ Inter Node Links, which both guarantee data traffic integrity and monitor
+ the peer node's availability.
+
+- Cluster Scalability
+
+ By applying the Overlapping Ring Monitoring algorithm on the inter node links
+ it is possible to scale TIPC clusters up to 1000 nodes with a maintained
+ neighbor failure discovery time of 1-2 seconds. For smaller clusters this
+ time can be made much shorter.
+
+- Neighbor Discovery
+
+ Neighbor Node Discovery in the cluster is done by Ethernet broadcast or UDP
+ multicast, when any of those services are available. If not, configured peer
+ IP addresses can be used.
+
+- Configuration
+
+ When running TIPC in single node mode no configuration whatsoever is needed.
+ When running in cluster mode TIPC must as a minimum be given a node address
+ (before Linux 4.17) and told which interface to attach to. The "tipc"
+ configuration tool makes is possible to add and maintain many more
+ configuration parameters.
+
+- Performance
+
+ TIPC message transfer latency times are better than in any other known protocol.
+ Maximal byte throughput for inter-node connections is still somewhat lower than
+ for TCP, while they are superior for intra-node and inter-container throughput
+ on the same host.
+
+- Language Support
+
+ The TIPC user API has support for C, Python, Perl, Ruby, D and Go.
+
+More Information
+----------------
+
+- How to set up TIPC:
+
+ http://tipc.io/getting_started.html
+
+- How to program with TIPC:
+
+ http://tipc.io/programming.html
+
+- How to contribute to TIPC:
+
+- http://tipc.io/contacts.html
+
+- More details about TIPC specification:
+
+ http://tipc.io/protocol.html
+
+
+Implementation
+==============
+
+TIPC is implemented as a kernel module in net/tipc/ directory.
TIPC Base Types
---------------