Why is the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack the best?

[Chad Perrin]

Perhaps they rely on the opinions of other OSes' developers -- many of
whom have borrowed FreeBSD TCP/IP code to bootstrap their own network
stacks.  Of course, I think a number of factors contribute to this
without necessarily proving it is the technical "best":

* BSD Unix was first out the gate in the race to TCP/IP.
* FreeBSD uses the BSD License, which makes its code easy to reuse.
* Developers for the various open source BSD Unix systems tend to have a
  high regard for "correctness".
* I haven't looked at it personally, but have heard that FreeBSD's TCP/IP
  stack source code is quite clean and readable -- and therefore easily
  reused.

There may be other reasons involved.  FreeBSD does tend to rate fairly
well in network performance benchmarks, by the way, but those benchmarks
are not typically tuned for testing the TCP/IP stack *specifically*, from
what I've seen.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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