Hi all,
IANA received an IP protocol number allocation request from Jon Maloy
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> for the Transparent Inter Process
Communication (TIPC) protocol. I picked up this request as Internet AD as the
registration procedure requires IESG Approval. I had provided the information
below to the IESG and discussed this with a favorable view of this request. I
am recommending allocation of an IP protocol number for this. If you have any
concerns that you think I might have overlooked, please let me know by end of
day March 24 2020.
After several round trips of back and forth probing I had collected the
following information regarding the protocol number request for TIPC. There
were two main questions I had for him:
* Q1: Why did they want an IP protocol number?
* Q2: Is the protocol implemented and deployed widely?
Q1: Why did they want an IP protocol number?
====================================
There are two main reasons why they want to reserve an IP protocol number:
1) Performance
They are currently working on adding GSO support to TIPC, including a TSO-like
"full-size buffer pass-thru" though virtio and the host OS tap interface. They
have experimentally implemented GSO across UDP tunnels, but performance is not
good because of the way the tunnel GSO is implemented, and there is no
'pass-thru' support for this in Linux. They have even done the same at the pure
L2 level, but L2 transport is sometimes not accepted by the cloud maintainers
or the telco operators, and hence they need an alternative. The best
alternative, both from a performance and acceptability viewpoint would be to
establish TIPC as a full-fledged IP protocol, apart from the traditional L2
bearer many users are still using.
2) Currently TIPC has two user address types:
struct tipc_service_addr{
uint32_t type;
uint32_t instance;
uint32_t node;
};
struct tipc_service_addr{
uint32_t port;
uint32_t node;
};
They want to complement this with a new API where we have a unified address
type:
struct tipc_addr{
u8 type[16];
u8 instance[16];
u8 node[16];
};
This would give a 128-bit value range for both 'type', 'instance' and 'node',
and opens up for new opportunities:
- Users will never need to coordinate 'type' values since there will no risk of
collisions.
- Users can put whatever they want into the fields, e.g., an IPv6 address, a
Kubernetes or Docker container id, a LUKS disk UUID or just a plain string.
For the 'node' id this has already been implemented and released, but it is not
reflected in the API yet.
For the API extension they need a new IPPROTO_TIPC socket type which can be
registered and instantiated independently from the traditional AF_TIPC socket
type.
You can find more info about this at http://tipc.io
Q2: Is the protocol implemented and deployed widely?
==========================================
The requester provided the following information when I asked about who was
currently using TIPC (pretty much about adoption and deployment):
I can give you a list of current or recently active code contributors and
companies/people who have been asking for support:
Huawei:
For natural reasons I don't know any details about them, I can only name
persons I have seen contributing to netdev or being active on our mailing
lists. Huawei people sometimes use gmail addresses when posting questions and
patches, so there are more persons than I have listed here.
Dmitry Kolmakov
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Ji Qin <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Wei Yongjun <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Yue Haibing <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Junwei Hu <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Jie Liu <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Qiang Ning <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Zhiqiang Liu <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Miaohe Lin <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Wang Wang <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Kang Zhou <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Suanming Mou <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Hu Junwei is the one I see most active at the moment.
Nokia:
Tommi Rantala <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Verizon:
Amar Nv <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Jayaraj Wilson,
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Hewlett Packard Enterprise:
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
WindRiver:
Ying Xue <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
He is my co-maintainer at netdev ans sourcefoge.
Windriver has several products in the field based on TIPC, e.g. control system
for Sikorsky helicopters.
Orange:
Christophe JAILLET
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Redhat:
The person contacting me to have TIPC integrated and maintained in RHEL-8.0 was
Sirius Rayner-Karlsson <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
He motivated it with a request from "a telco vendor", but I don't know which
one.
Hence, TIPC is now integrated in and officially supported from RHEL 8.1
ABB:
https://new.abb.com/pl
Mikolaj K. Chojnacki <[email protected]>
Krzysztof Rybak <[email protected]>
Ericsson:
All (dozens of) applications based on the TSP and Core Middleware/Components
Based Architecture (CMW/CBA) platforms is per definition based on TIPC. They
have not yet started to use TIPC on their Kubernetes based ADP platform, but
there is work ongoing on this.
I also see numerous other people being active, from small (I believe)
companies, universities and private contributors. E.g.,
Innovsys Inc http://www.innovsys.com/innovsys/
Allied Telesis https://www.alliedtelesis.com/
Telaverge Communications http://www.telaverge.com/
Ivan Serdyuk <[email protected]> (seems to be responsible for the
ZeroMQ port of TIPC)
John Hopkins University / Fast LTA, Munich <[email protected]>
Just to mention a few...
TIPC is currently maintained jointly by Ericsson, WindRiver, Redhat, and the
Australian consulting company DEK Technologies https://www.dektech.com.au/
Thanks
Suresh
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