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I can't honestly answer that with the NDA I signed. However there is some public information on some components that has been shared in this thread which allow

• tptacek 3y ago
  Yes, the one link shared says essentially the opposite thing.
  • dijit 3y ago
    You may have read it wrong.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Did I? How?
      • dijit 3y ago
        For one by assuming the work that is done primarily for microkernels/appliances is the absolute limit of userspace networking at Google and that similar work would not go into a hypervisor (hypervisors which are universally treated as a vSwitch in almost all virtual environments the world over). And making that assumption when there are many public examples of Google doing this in other areas such as gVisor and Netstack?
        • tptacek 3y ago
          If you have information about other userspace networking projects at Google, I'd love to read it, but the Snap paper repeatedly suggests that the userspace networking characteristics of the design are distinctive. Certainly, most networking at Google isn't netstack. Have you done much with netstack? It is many things, but ultra-high-performance isn't one of them.
          • dijit 3y ago
            userspace networking will take different forms depending on the use-case. Which is one of the arguments of why to do it that way; instead of using general purpose networking. I haven't the time or inclination to find anything public on this, nor am I interested really in convincing you. Ask a former googler.
            • tptacek 3y ago
              OK. I did. They said "no, it's not the case that networking at Google is predominately user-mode". (They also said "it depends on what you mean by most"). Do you have more you want me to relay to them? Did you work on this stuff at Google? Per the Snap thread above: if you're building a router or a load balancer or some other bit of network infrastructure, it's not unlikely that there's userland IP involved. But if you're shipping a normal program on, like, Borg or whatever, it's kernel networking.
              • dijit 3y ago
                I worked as a Google partner for some specialised projects within AAA online gaming. I continue in a similar position today and thus my NDA is still in complete effect which limits what I can say if there’s nothing public. I have not worked for Google, just very closely.
                • tptacek 3y ago
                  Oh. Then, unless a Googler jumps in here and says I'm wrong: no, ordinary applications at Google are not as a rule built on userspace networking. That's not my opinion (though: it was my prior, having done a bunch of userspace networking stuff), it's the result of asking Google people about it. Maybe it's all changed in the last year! But then: that makes all of this irrelevant to the thread, about FreeBSD vs. Linux network stack performance.
                  • dijit 3y ago
                    Based on this I understand why you're talking like this: I think you have made an assumption/interpretation here and argued the assumption because nobody here (I believe) has claimed that Google only uses user-space networking; merely that google makes use of user-space networking where it's "appropriate" (IE; when FreeBSD would have had an advantage). Which is backed up by basically everything in this thread. Which is why I said you "probably read it wrong". Google is much happier to throw hardware at the problem in most cases, only when it really matters and they would have had to rearchitect the kernel to improve a situation any further do they break out the user-space networking. The point I was driving at was that it's more common than you think. Your base assertion that it's ubiquitous is very obviously false because Chromebooks are pretty common inside google offices and those are running stock chromeOS (except in the offices that are developing chromeOS)