4 ms·
At this point, they should've just gone for an in-house bare-bones operating system that supports the bare minimum: reading chunks from disk, encrypting them, a
by csmpltn 4y ago
At this point, they should've just gone for an in-house bare-bones operating system that supports the bare minimum: reading chunks from disk, encrypting them, and forwarding them to the NIC.
Besides that, it sees like all of the heavy lifting here is done by Mellanox hardware...
- wmf 4y agoFreeBSD is their "in-house" operating system since they modify it to do what they want.
- csmpltn 4y agoBut do they really need an entire operating system for what amounts to simply copying around chunks of data? I think they could've gone for some slim RTOS-ish solution instead: no user-mode, no drivers, bare minimum.
- wmf 4y agoThey're using the FreeBSD filesystem and network stack, both of which are significant amounts of code. I guess they could have tried the rump kernel concept but it sounds like a lot of work.
- drewg123 4y agoI worked on an OS like that once. The problem is with "all the other stuff" that you need to support that's outside the core mission of your OS. You wind up bogged down on each additional feature that you need to implement from scratch (or port from another OS with a compatible license). With FreeBSD, all this comes for free. We chose to use FreeBSD, and have contributed our code back to the FreeBSD upstream to make the world a better place for everyone.
- drewg123 4y agoIts only doing the crypto. The VM system and the TCP stack are doing most of the heavy lifting, and are both stock FreeBSD.