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Date:      Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:34:17 +0200
From:      Yury Tarasievich <grog@grsu.by>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD firewall for high profile hosts - waste of time ?
Message-ID:  <3E299E29.4030205@grsu.by>
References:  <20030116124254.J9642-100000@mail.econolodgetulsa.com> <3E2739D1.5402B7A6@mindspring.com> <3E282DE5.4090209@grsu.by> <3E289146.1EBBB3B8@mindspring.com>

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Terry Lambert wrote:

>Yury Tarasievich wrote:
>  
>
[...info and pointers greatly appreciated...]

Now:

>Most of the reasons this stuff is not in FreeBSD is NIH (not
>being the pet research project of a committer), license, the
>need to "productize" the code from research, etc..
>
>For the complaints about scalability... Linux has a project that
>they are very proud of, in order to obtain 10,000 simultaneous
>TCP connections.  With respect, I personally achieved 1,600,000
>simultaneous TCP connections on a modified FreeBSD box with 4G
>of RAM.  During this process, I found a credentials reference
>count overflow bug (since fixed in FreeBSD), which occurred on
>close, after opening more than 32,763 connections in one process.
>No one else reported this bug, so I have to assume that no one
>else ever ran FreeBSD up to that number of connections, before.
>
>So... the primary reason is that no one is using FreeBSD under
>the loads necessary to cause the problems to exhibit themselves.
>You have to have a need in order to be interested in a way of
>satifying a need.  8-).
>  
>
I wasn't explicit with my question, although with your explanations my 
question(s) seems rather rhetoric -- but I'd like to know your opinion:

- what is the *real* *reason* for stuff that good not going into FreeBSD?

and

- doesn't all that mean that the supposed "plentiness of choice" turn 
out to be rather its opposite? has one not belonging to the "inner 
circle" *any* chance of influencing things course?

>>You were also saying in same post that:
>>
>>>The fixes are mostly
>>>simple, but for whatever reason, they never make it into FreeBSD
>>>proper (my theory is that the developement focus is heavily skewed
>>>to general purpose processing, rather than network processing).
>>>      
>>>
>>And throttling the "FlagFeature"???
>>    
>>
>
>That sort of thing has to be there, for FreeBSD to be interesting
>as a reasearch OS, so that additional work occurs on the platform;
>that's pretty much a given.  You wouldn't have someone as well-known
>as Sam Leffler donating code, if that code was unlikely to get in,
>since it would be a waste of his time and effort (the same reason
>some people have left the project, actually).
>  
>
That I didn't understand. People left because they couldn't get their 
code in or because they couldn't stop code of well-known persons getting in?

>So even if you don't like "feature creep" or "bloat", when it impacts
>top end performance, top end performance really doesn't matter to most
>people who are doing the coding (i.e. how many OC3's do you have to
>your computer?  How many would you need to have to saturate even a
>single gigabit ethernet?).
>  
>
I wasn't precise in wording. Possibly, one cannot even see the real 
impact of worsening of network processing. I just do not see the good 
reason for *actually* making network processing capability -- the most 
praised feature of free *nixes -- worse, not better. And I think it's 
bad press, too.






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