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Date:      Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:58:59 -0500 (EST)
From:      "Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@Sarnoff.COM>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Virtual Interface Architecture
Message-ID:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.980331103920.9500A-100000@terra>
In-Reply-To: <199803311354.PAA22544@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>

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On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> Are you looking at 10us one-way
> on a single machine, or on a cluster, going through the net (in
> which case you also have the startup costs of the net interface,
> with its few microsecond's inter-frame gap on ethernet...) ?

The challenge number I put to the extreme linux conference was this: 
"from user-mode system call instruction to first bit on the wire, 10 
microseconds". 

Why this? Well, UNET does it now, albeit in a somewhat ugly way. It would 
be far better to do it via TCP. 

> I assume you want the reliability that TCP gives you, but depending on
> the underlying network you might not need to implement it in the protocol
> stack. Probably you also want message boundaries to be preserved,
> something that TCP does not guarantee. And if you want to send
> different messages to different receivers, you would not like to pay
> the price of opening/closing a connection each time.

The problem is that if you do 'something other than tcp', you find in 
many cases that people recreate things like:
sequence numbers
retransmit 

see, e.g., the nfs-over-udp mess and the way it evolved. So, i want to 
skip that middle step (recreate tcp) and just go right to having a fast 
tcp. 

In fact, on the RP3, people who worked on that project told me that they
added lost-packet checking in the software. This on an MP interconnect. 

anyway, the relation of this to -hackers is that it would be neat to see 
freebsd get to the challenge number soon.

ron

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