5 ms·

I want to see more layer 4 protocols, not stuff built on top of them, personally. That's where things get interesting.

by junon 3y ago

gymbeaux 3y ago
Honestly I think there’s a lack of talent for that, not only to develop the protocol, but to support it. How many of us really understand OSI?
- luma 3y ago
  OSI is just a model, there’s not all that much to understand there. It’s simply a way to categorize network technologies using a common language.
  - cjensen 3y ago
    OSI is an entire networking stack designed by committee that died from disuse [1]. The only thing we now remember of it are the functional layers within the protocol. For example, people sometimes refer to TCP as a "Layer 4" protocol even though (a) TCP predates the invention of Layer 4 and (b) TCP is a square peg that does not exactly fit into the round hole that is Layer 4. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      I wish we could forget the other remnants of OSI like x.509, ASN.1, and LDAP. Those were the things good enough to be used for real systems, and I'd still rather crawl over broken glass than implement any of them. Imagine how bad the rest of it was.
wmf 3y ago
There's no interesting distinction between a "native" transport protocol and a transport protocol running on top of a UDP shim. The UDP header is probably necessary for ECMP.
- StillBored 3y ago
  ? Maybe i'm misunderstanding what your trying to say, but there are major differences between an ethernet + IP transport and other transports like fiber channel (or even token ring, atm, etc) which has built into the lowest layers buffer crediting / flow control, retransmission, prioritization, etc. Sure you can build much of that higher in the stack but it requires everything in the network to be playing the same game to assure QoS metrics, and if that's the case you don't really have a normal IP network anymore.
  - wmf 3y ago
    By transport protocol I mean layer 4. FC/TR/ATM/IB are (mostly) layer 2 protocols. I think the idea is that Falcon assumes the underlying network is semi-crappy and works around that (e.g. Falcon assumes that packets arrive out of order then it puts them back in order).

I want to see more layer 4 protocols, not stuff built on top of them, personally. That's where things get interesting.

by junon 3y ago

I want to see more layer 4 protocols, not stuff built on top of them, personally. That's where things get interesting.

Honestly I think there’s a lack of talent for that, not only to develop the protocol, but to support it. How many of us really understand OSI?

luma 3y ago
OSI is just a model, there’s not all that much to understand there. It’s simply a way to categorize network technologies using a common language.
- cjensen 3y ago
  OSI is an entire networking stack designed by committee that died from disuse [1]. The only thing we now remember of it are the functional layers within the protocol. For example, people sometimes refer to TCP as a "Layer 4" protocol even though (a) TCP predates the invention of Layer 4 and (b) TCP is a square peg that does not exactly fit into the round hole that is Layer 4. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I wish we could forget the other remnants of OSI like x.509, ASN.1, and LDAP. Those were the things good enough to be used for real systems, and I'd still rather crawl over broken glass than implement any of them. Imagine how bad the rest of it was.

wmf 3y ago

There's no interesting distinction between a "native" transport protocol and a transport protocol running on top of a UDP shim. The UDP header is probably necessary for ECMP.

StillBored 3y ago
? Maybe i'm misunderstanding what your trying to say, but there are major differences between an ethernet + IP transport and other transports like fiber channel (or even token ring, atm, etc) which has built into the lowest layers buffer crediting / flow control, retransmission, prioritization, etc. Sure you can build much of that higher in the stack but it requires everything in the network to be playing the same game to assure QoS metrics, and if that's the case you don't really have a normal IP network anymore.
- wmf 3y ago
  By transport protocol I mean layer 4. FC/TR/ATM/IB are (mostly) layer 2 protocols. I think the idea is that Falcon assumes the underlying network is semi-crappy and works around that (e.g. Falcon assumes that packets arrive out of order then it puts them back in order).