4 ms·

Hello, I'm genuinely curious: why did you implement it in FreeBSD rather than Linux? Isn't that kind of offload something that already exists in Linux? Or does

by forty 6y ago

Hello, I'm genuinely curious: why did you implement it in FreeBSD rather than Linux? Isn't that kind of offload something that already exists in Linux? Or does something in the way Linux is implemented/designed that makes it impractical / impossible to implement as efficiently? Or is somehow Linux not secure enough for your use case? Or not something else enough? I'm asking because I'm always interested to know what are the practical limitations of Linux and also because, while I think it's nice that Linux had some serious competitors, I cannot help being a bit sad that contribution like this will only benefit the few people that use FreeBSD (even if to be fair, it seems that it will benefit all netflix customers at least, which is quite a few people ;) )

nix23 6y ago
>I cannot help being a bit sad that contribution like this will only benefit the few people that use FreeBSD Same could be said the other way around, the thing is Linux can implement it and even take the code, the other way is rather difficult....so much for freedom. And not sure what you mean with "few" people, the few Playstation 3/4/5 users? Juniper? OpnSense/Pfsense installations? Or the few Truenas/Freenas users? >Or not something else enough? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4
- forty 6y ago
  I still expect the number to be pretty small compared to the number of Linux users, no matter how you define user (if playstation users counts as freebsd users, then I guess nearly everyone is a Linux user :) ) The point of the licence is a good point. Is the kind of code drewg123 is referring to regularly copied from BSD to Linux? (i understand it should be possible in this direction?). Thanks for the video, looks like exactly what I was looking for, I will watch it later.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >small compared to the number of Linux users Not to mention all the Minix and NucleusRTOS Users ;)
    - forty 6y ago
      Haha exactly :) my own definition of a user of an operating system is someone who know what operating system they are using. So a playstation and a Netflix user would not count as freebsd users (they are not using FreeBSD, they are using a playstation). Netflix engineers are the FreeBSD users. Pfsense and freenas users certainly counts ;)
  - toast0 6y ago
    Most of the changes Netflix is making aren't really directly copyable. A lot of it is related to or tied to the virtual memory model, and Linux's model is different. However, publicizing the ideas and the results is valuable to other operating systems even without the code. If you're building something on Linux (or Windows? or ?) that could benefit from kTLS (including NIC accelerated kTLS), knowing it can work and having a roadmap is great. You would still need to do the plumbing, but you could skip a lot of the design. Being able to look at the code is nice too. And, if you're willing to try FreeBSD + nginx, you could jump directly to that. If you're deploying something with similar performance characteristics to a CDN box, it's probably a very narrow application, and doesn't need to run on the same stack as the rest of your fleet.

by forty 6y ago

nix23 6y ago

>I cannot help being a bit sad that contribution like this will only benefit the few people that use FreeBSD Same could be said the other way around, the thing is Linux can implement it and even take the code, the other way is rather difficult....so much for freedom. And not sure what you mean with "few" people, the few Playstation 3/4/5 users? Juniper? OpnSense/Pfsense installations? Or the few Truenas/Freenas users? >Or not something else enough? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4

forty 6y ago
I still expect the number to be pretty small compared to the number of Linux users, no matter how you define user (if playstation users counts as freebsd users, then I guess nearly everyone is a Linux user :) ) The point of the licence is a good point. Is the kind of code drewg123 is referring to regularly copied from BSD to Linux? (i understand it should be possible in this direction?). Thanks for the video, looks like exactly what I was looking for, I will watch it later.
- nix23 6y ago
  >small compared to the number of Linux users Not to mention all the Minix and NucleusRTOS Users ;)
  - forty 6y ago
    Haha exactly :) my own definition of a user of an operating system is someone who know what operating system they are using. So a playstation and a Netflix user would not count as freebsd users (they are not using FreeBSD, they are using a playstation). Netflix engineers are the FreeBSD users. Pfsense and freenas users certainly counts ;)
- toast0 6y ago
  Most of the changes Netflix is making aren't really directly copyable. A lot of it is related to or tied to the virtual memory model, and Linux's model is different. However, publicizing the ideas and the results is valuable to other operating systems even without the code. If you're building something on Linux (or Windows? or ?) that could benefit from kTLS (including NIC accelerated kTLS), knowing it can work and having a roadmap is great. You would still need to do the plumbing, but you could skip a lot of the design. Being able to look at the code is nice too. And, if you're willing to try FreeBSD + nginx, you could jump directly to that. If you're deploying something with similar performance characteristics to a CDN box, it's probably a very narrow application, and doesn't need to run on the same stack as the rest of your fleet.