Enea will demonstrate the Linux port of its “Linx” interprocess communication (IPC) technology at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF), next week in Orlando, Fla. The company touts Linx as a more performant, scalable alternative to TIPC (transparent IPC) in heterogeneous, distributed computing environments such as those found in telecommunications.

Both Linx and TIPC are open-source “message passing” IPC schemes. Unlike mailboxes or shared memory, message passing allows processes to communicate across multiple processors, blades, and shelves, Enea points out.

Compared with TIPC, Linx uses a lighter connection protocol, according to Enea, resulting in higher throughput and lower latency. Claimed intra-node throughput gains are 20 percent, while latency is 25 percent lower. Claimed inter-node throughputs are 25 percent higher, with 10 percent lower latency.

Linx's “message passing link protocol” diagram
(Click to enlarge)
In its FTF demo, Enea will show off Linx running atop MontaVista Linux, on a pair of Freescale 8548 processors networked by gigabit Ethernet. Two tests will be run, each with message sizes ranging from 64 bytes to 64K bytes. One measures round-trip message latency, while the other measures maximum outbound data transfer rates at full CPU utilization.

Enea says the tests will demonstrate the “superior latency and throughput characteristics of Linux.” The tests are adapted from standard TIPC benchmarks, it says, and are available to customers for independent use.

Enea's director of product management, Mike Christofferson, stated, “LINX is faster, more efficient, and more flexible than TIPC or TCP, scales from DSPs to 64-bit CPUs, and can handle any cluster topology. It's also open source. We believe that developers who evaluate both LINX and TIPC will find that LINX offers the superior IPC technology, regardless of the target operating system or CPU.”

Enea released Linx under an open source license in March. In April, it announced a broad partnership with MontaVista.

MontaVista/Enea competitor Wind River has staunchly backed TIPC.

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