Enea, a provider of network software and services, today announced the release of Enea LINX for Linux 2.0, which includes protocol and feature negotiation to enable seamless upgrades of system subsets with newer versions of the protocol, without concern for backwards compatibility with non-upgraded portions of the system. This addition to the protocol ensures forward and backward compatibility with all future versions of LINX for Linux. LINX provides reliable, high-performance, inter-process communications services that make complex distributed systems easier to conceptualize, model, partition, and scale.

    LINX can even act as a transport for bearer protocols such as UDP and TCP, and is efficient enough to work with DSPs. Any system that uses the latest version of Enea LINX is completely forward-compatible with newer versions of LINX, and vice-versa. As LINX nodes connect through the initial connection-establishment protocol, each node discovers the version of the other and negotiates the lowest common denominator of features and protocol versions that are required for effective communications.

    LINX is independent of the underlying processor, operating system, or interconnect, and has the ability to support control and data plane applications over reliable and unreliable media, while delivering a 20 percent higher performance than TIPC. LINX also supports any distributed system topology, from a single processor on a single blade, to large networks with complex cluster topologies deployed on hundreds of processors in a multi-rack system. Utilizing direct message passing, LINX provides the performance and versatility needed to satisfy local and remote IPC requirements across all CPU, OS, and interconnect boundaries.

    "Upgrading the basic communications protocol in a deployed system has been a large problem in the past," stated Michael Christofferson, director of product management at Enea. "However, our new protocol and feature negotiation addition allows upgrades to portions of the system without affecting the whole system and also enables new subsystems to be added to an existing system without regard to communications protocol compatibility issues."

    LINX also provides built-in support for redundant links, both for physical CPU interconnects and logical connections between endpoints. LINX for Linux version 2.0 is available now as a free open-source download. LINX enhances distributed system availability by providing supervision and failure reporting for designated connections.  

    LINX enable application processes distributed across multiple operating systems, CPUs, and interconnects to communicate in a seamless fashion, as if they were running on the same CPU under the same operating system. LINX services are independent of the underlying hardware, operating system, physical interconnect, and network topology. This consistency and transparency makes distributed applications easy to partition and develop, enables them to be reconfigured and scaled with minimal changes to the application code, and makes it easier to integrate software components from other suppliers. It also increases overall system availability and makes systems easier to debug and maintain over time.