Re: My planned work on networking stack

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:24:31AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
...
> I know that our organization would love to see SACK. Much of the
> high-performance network development that used to be on FreeBSD has
> moved to Linux simply because SACK is essential. You can't run
> trans-oceanic TCP streams of gigabit or more throughput without it.
> 
> 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. 

Whenever i hear these comments, i am very annoyed at one thing
(which in a smaller scale repeats all over the place):
people are more than happy to spend big money for things like
routers or bandwidth or any kind of "commercial" stuff, but when
it comes to open source it must be free or nothing.

I hope it is clear to everyone that an investment in the 50K$
range would provide a professional-grade implementation of SACK
for FreeBSD, and this money is in the noise for any organization
that uses trans-oceanic gigabit links.
The fact that nobody seems to care about funding such a work
either means that whatever is available already fits their
goals, in which case I agree that there is no point
in using something different, or that these discussions
are based more on thin air than substance.

You certainly raise a valid point on the fact that for the
vast majority of people probably SACK is mostly useless.

	cheers
	luigi

> 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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