My planned work on networking stack

[Julian Elischer]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Kevin Oberman wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 13:22:55 -0800
> > From: Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
> > 
> > On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 12:22:10PM -0800, Brooks Davis wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:24:31AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Unfortunately, SACK is often looked upon as a waste of effort to those
> > > > who use nets in more commercial forms where aggregation of lots of small
> > > > streams is how fat pipes are used. Research big science are about the
> > > > only ones who have a real need for this kind of performance and it's
> > > > growing fast. Without SACK, FreeBSD will be a non-starter for these
> > > > purposes. 
> > > 
> > > I've got a co-worker who is part of a research group at ISI that
> > > is doing research on long fat pipes with large streams.  They are
> > > intrested in doing a SACK implementation.  I hope to have some more
> > > information later this week.
> > > 
> > 
> > Has anyone looked at Luigi's stuff?
> > 
> > http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/sack.html
> > 
> > The page states that Luigi had SACK available in FreeBSD 2.1R,
> > which was released 8 years ago.
> 
> I am aware of at least 3 implementations of SACK for FreeBSD over the
> years, none of which ever made it into the system. At least one of the
> people who submitted a patch (his was for 2.2) also provided some
> significant enhancements to one of the GigE drivers that was done with
> DOE funding to support the LBNL developed BRO IDS, but which were
> globally beneficial.
> 
> In both cases, the patches were ignored by those with commit bits and
> the person who did the work says that he will no longer bother to submit
> his work to FreeBSD.  I was not using FreeBSD at the time that this
> happened, so I don't know what, if any, objections were raised to the
> GigE patches, but I have since seen SACK disparaged by others as a waste
> of time that is not really needed.  Obviously they have no interest in
> >Gbps streams where we have an interest in >20Gbps streams.



I believe that sme of the patches were considerred "experimental and
just lacked someone to make them production quality. In other cases they
were not against 'current' and porting them to -curren twas left as "an
exercise for the reader".  No-one who had that ime had a need for them.



> 
> I'm not trying to stat a flame war here, but it is frustrating and this
> initiative for a major network code overhaul makes me hope that
> something will actually happen. It's just that FreeBSD's network stack
> was once the best around and it's simply not today. Andre's proposal
> could go a LONG way toward fixing this and I am eagerly looking forward
> to if!
> -- 
> R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
> Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
> E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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