R3303-HP HSR6800 Routers Network Management and Monitoring Configuration Guide

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Configuring IPC
This chapter provides an overview of Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and describes the IPC
monitoring commands.
Overview
IPC provides a reliable communication mechanism among processing units, typically CPUs. IPC is
typically used on a distributed device to provide reliable inter-card or inter-device transmission. This
section describes the basic IPC concepts.
Node
An IPC node is an independent IPC-capable processing unit, typically, a CPU.
The HSR6602/6604/6608/6616 routers have multiple IPC nodes, because each card in them has at
least one CPU.
The 6602 router has only one IPC node, because it has only one CPU.
Link
An IPC link is a connection between any two IPC nodes. Any two IPC nodes have one and only one IPC
link for sending and receiving packets. All IPC nodes are fully meshed.
The system creates IPC links when it is initialized. An IPC node, upon startup, sends handshake packets
to other nodes. If the handshake succeeds, a connection is established.
The system uses link status to identify the link connectivity between two nodes. An IPC node can have
multiple links, and each link has its own status.
Channel
A channel is the communication interface between peer upper layer application modules that use
different IPC nodes. Each node assigns a locally unique channel number to each upper layer application
module for identification.
An upper layer application module sends data to an IPC module across a channel, and the IPC module
sends the data to a peer node across a link, as shown in Figure 33.