6 ms·

Side conversation. I am constantly amazed how a tiny piece of code, the linux (or bsd) TCP stack, can be a source of mysteries and adventures for decades, eve

• option_greek 7y ago
  Isn't that just TCP (rather than TCP stack).
  • imglorp 7y ago
    Yes, sure, but the protocol and one implementation of it are pretty tightly coupled. As a measure of algorithmic complexity (ala Chaitin?), the kernel code should show us at least order of magnitude, 4 K lines of code. Compared to, say Google which is 2 billion, a tad more complex.
• dunkelheit 7y ago
  This is an example of "the settings problem". When a system has even a moderate number of behaviors controlled by their respective settings the number of possible interactions rises exponentially. Combine that with different possible user behaviors and you get a combinatorial explosion of possibilities with some weird results that are non-obvious even to experts.
  • imglorp 7y ago
    That's a good point, plus it's not just (states x transitions), it's also a whole bunch of hidden state: the other guy's state as well as all the packets in flight.