Fire Engine??

Fire Engine??

[Mr. BOFH]

Sun has announced that they have redone their TCP/IP stack and is showing
for some instances a 30% improvement over Linux....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html

[OT] Re: Fire Engine??

[Nick Piggin]

Mr. BOFH wrote:

>Sun has announced that they have redone their TCP/IP stack and is showing
>for some instances a 30% improvement over Linux....
>
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html
>
>

Thats odd. Since when did Linux's TCP/IP stack become the benchmark? :)

PS. This isn't really appropriate for this list. I'm sure an open and
    verifiable comparison would be welcomed though.

Re: [OT] Re: Fire Engine??

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 12:48:19PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> 
> Mr. BOFH wrote:
> 
> >Sun has announced that they have redone their TCP/IP stack and is showing
> >for some instances a 30% improvement over Linux....
> >
> >http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html
> >
> >
> 
> Thats odd. Since when did Linux's TCP/IP stack become the benchmark? :)
> 
> PS. This isn't really appropriate for this list. I'm sure an open and
>    verifiable comparison would be welcomed though.

And not to dis my Alma Mater but I tend think the whole TOE idea is a lose.
I used to think otherwise, while I was a Sun employee, and Sun employee #1
pointed out to me that CPUs and memory were getting faster more quickly than
the TOE type answers could come to market.  He was right then and he seems
to still be right.

Maybe throwing processors at the problem will make him (and me now) wrong
but I have to think I could do better things with a CPU than offload some
TCP packets.

Linux has it right.  Make the normal case fast and lightweight and ignore
the other cases.  There are no other cases if the normal path is fast.

Another way to say "fast path" is "our normal path sucks".
-- 
---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm

Re: Fire Engine??

[David S. Miller]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:15:12 -0800
"Mr. BOFH" <icerbofh@hotmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html

This was amusing to read, let's read the claim carefuly,
shall we?

	"We worked hard on efficiency, and we now measure,
	 at a given network workload on identical x86 hardware,
	 we use 30 percent less CPU than Linux."

So his claim is that, in their mesaurements, "CPU utilization"
was lower in their stack.  Was he using 2.6.x and TSO capable
cards on the Linux side?  If not, it's not apples to apples
against are current upcoming technology.

And while his CPU utilization claim is interesting (I bet that gain
would go to zero if they'd used Linux TSO in 2.6.x), but was the
networking bandwidth and latency any better as a result?  I think it's
not by accident that the claim was phrased the way it was.

In fact, I bet their connection setup/teardown latency will go in the
toilet with this stuff and Solaris was already horrible in this area.
It is a well established fact that TOE technologies have this problem
because of how the socket setup/teardown operation with TOE cards
requires the OS to go over the bus a few times.

I'm not worried at all about Sun's fire engine.  It's preliminary
technology, and they are going to discover all of the problem TOE
stuff has that I've discussed several times on this list.

They even mention that they don't even support any current generation
shipping TOE cards yet, at least I offer a cpu utilization reduction
optimization (TSO in 2.6.x) with multiple implementation on current
generation hardware (e1000, tg3, etc.).

I fully welcome them to put Linux up against their incredible fire
engine crap in a sanctioned specweb run on identical hardware.  :)

Re: [OT] Re: Fire Engine??

[David S. Miller]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 18:11:11 -0800
Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> wrote:

> I used to think otherwise, while I was a Sun employee, and Sun employee #1
> pointed out to me that CPUs and memory were getting faster more quickly than
> the TOE type answers could come to market.  He was right then and he seems
> to still be right.

Maybe this was at least partially the impetus behind his recent
departure from the company.  And if not the impetus, a possible straw
that broke the camel's back.

How fast will cpus be when Sun actually deploys this stuff?

A commodity x86 U1 box at that time will probably have 6+ GHZ
cpus in it, and super-duper-DDR or whatever the current memory
technology will be.  Why do I need Sun's TOE crap in this box?
Where's all that precious CPU I need to be saving?

This stuff isn't really useful for huge database servers either.

Where do they plan to do, put Solaris10 on iSCSI drives?  ROFL! :)

These days Sun is already several laps behind before the green flag
even comes out to start the race.

Re: [OT] Re: Fire Engine??

[Rik van Riel]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Larry McVoy wrote:

> And not to dis my Alma Mater but I tend think the whole TOE idea is a
> lose. I used to think otherwise, while I was a Sun employee, and Sun
> employee #1 pointed out to me that CPUs and memory were getting faster
> more quickly than the TOE type answers could come to market.  He was
> right then and he seems to still be right.

I guess TCP offloading is a good way to stub your TOE ;)

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Re: Fire Engine??

[Valdis.Kletnieks]

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On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:15:12 PST, "Mr. BOFH" <icerbofh@hotmail.com>  said:
> 
> Sun has announced that they have redone their TCP/IP stack and is showing
> for some instances a 30% improvement over Linux....
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html

Hmm.. IBM tried this same idea with their 8232 Ethernet controller
(basically, an 'industrial' PC with a 3Com card and a bus&tag card)
and offload of some TCP/IP functionality back in 1988 or so.


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