Re: TCP resident expert?

On Sat, 15 Jan 2011, William Allen Simpson wrote:

> Who's the kernel expert on TCP around here?  ISC wants me to port TCPCT to 
> FreeBSD.  Although I've joined this list (some time ago), I've not seen any 
> traffic discussing TCP'ish things.  Need somebody willing to walk me through 
> the processes and check my code.

I don't think there's any single "the" expert -- rather, work on TCP is 
distributed over a number of developers who take various interests in the 
topic.  At the risk of pointing fingers:

Lawrence Stewart <lstewart_at_> has recently been involved in pluggable 
congestion control, new congestion control algorithms, TCP tracing, and 
various other things, and has been among our most active hands in TCP for the 
last year especially.  He might be the best first port of call because of this 
recent activity.

Rui Paulo <rpaulo_at_> did our TCP ECN support.

I've had my hands in TCP data structure/locking/etc on several occasions in 
the last couple of years, especially relating to SMP scalability, and most 
recently, TCP connection CPU affinity and hardware-driven load balancing (RSS, 
etc) as part of work for Juniper.

Andrew Opperman <andre_at_> has done significant work on features like TSO, LRO, 
timers, etc in the last couple of years, and before that reworked out TCP 
syncache implementation (so might be of particular interest).

Drew Gallatin <gallatin_at_> was the originator of our LRO code as part of his 
work at Myricom, and has taken a more general interest in stack performance.

Kip Macy (kmacy_at_) did our TCP offload implementation as part of work for 
Chelsio.

George Neville-Neil <gnn_at_> has been involved in TCP regression testing, as 
well as other TCP-related problems in the data centre.

Bjoern Zeeb <bz_at_> has been involved in our ongoing network stack 
virtualisation project, and has of necessity had his hands dirty in TCP.

And I feel certain there are others who, entirely accidentally and much to my 
embarrassment, I have omitted.

As Doug points out, however, the best way to reach folks interested in TCP is 
via the freebsd-net_at_ mailing list, as people come and go some over time, and 
taking any questions to that list will let the answers get archived.  Also, as 
people do come and go, the mailing list may help your requests not be dropped 
:-).

(I've CC'd that list)

Robert