Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 06:35:20 +0100 From: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl> To: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Cc: phk@critter.freebsd.dk, grog@lemis.com, rwatson@FreeBSD.org, imp@harmony.village.org, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Core's function (was: The Project and onward [was: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/netinet ip_output.c]) Message-ID: <20010314063520.C67604@daemon.ninth-circle.org> In-Reply-To: <20010313133108S.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>; from jkh@osd.bsdi.com on Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 01:31:08PM -0800 References: <20010313121002.F59348@wantadilla.lemis.com> <3794.984471257@critter> <20010313104930.C60817@daemon.ninth-circle.org> <20010313133108S.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
-On [20010313 23:08], Jordan Hubbard (jkh@osd.bsdi.com) wrote:
>> And unfortunately, most, if not all, of the discussions I have seen
>> raised are short-term based. We fail to work towards goals on the
>> longer term. Dare I name clustering yet again, yes I do.
>
>If you dare to raise clustering then you should also dare to consider
>taking on the design work involved and releasing some white papers on
>potential approaches to solving the problem in FreeBSD. To do
>otherwise is to simply throw out a buzzword ("clustering!") and say
>that somebody, somewhere, should work on it because everyone says it's
>important. That's not architectural discussion, that's a bullet point
>on a marketing slide.
I did take on that, albeit I underestimated the amount of clue I lacked
way back then to accomplish my own petpeeve, service clustering.
We have the infrastructure ready to discuss clustering in all its facets
at cluster@freebsd.org, also Eivind and me worked on getting some basic
information up at lucifer.bart.nl's webserver.
I then proceeded to gather more and more clue in the areas needed to get
real work done on this subject [like network code, seeing how commercial
vendors solved it, IEEE/ACM papers, general papers on some certain
network things].
I am still working towards that goal, but I have to take the touristic
route at times.
I am taking the long route, because I have no other options, yet I know
of a lot of people with a lot of experience in this sort of thing, and
yet for some reason they decide not to work on a topic like this. I
wonder why, because it cannot be due to the difficulty of the task at
hand. We all know the kind of sadomachosistic work which had been
performed by a lot of people before. =P
>The biggest reason I can see for things like clustering not being
>addressed, and here I'm going to reveal a basic secret of the universe
>so watch carefully, is that it's HARD. :-) I'll bet you cringed when I
>told you to write a white paper because if you know anything about CS
>at all, you know that I didn't just ask you to do something trivial
>that you'll be able to pump out in an hour or two.
No, white papers don't scare me. Like I said before, please don't
assume things.
And yes, I understand that it takes longer than most people think.
>That's why so much of this kind of work goes on inside of universities.
>They have the kind of time and personnel resources to write white
>papers which give a programmer the kind of outline they can work from
>in writing some actual implementation code, and that's usually hardly
>trivial either. Some of the most complex work to enter FreeBSD in the
>last couple of years didn't come out of discussions in -arch, in fact,
>they came out of white papers like Ganger-Patt's "CSE-TR-254-95" which
>Kirk followed in writing the softupdates code. Even just the
>implementation work for that was so hard that he didn't turn around and
>give that code away, either, he made money on it for over a year before
>he was happy enough with the return on all the time he'd invested to
>give it away.
That's Kirk's own decision, which I respect. I myself am not interested
in making money, since most of this work is done during my free time.
>This is why I think a lot of your and phk's recent hand-waving on this
>topic may be "right" in principle but just not very realistic either.
Time will tell, I guess, then.
I'll just continue my path like I always have, mayhap even more
determined to getting there.
--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai .oUo. asmodai@[wxs.nl|freebsd.org]
Documentation nutter/C-rated Coder BSD: Technical excellence at its best
D78D D0AD 244D 1D12 C9CA 7152 035C 1138 546A B867
Looking for the Sun that eclipsed behind black feathered wings...
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010314063520.C67604>