Reconsidering network channels

Reconsidering network channels

Posted Jul 28, 2006 18:39 UTC (Fri) by PlaguedByPenguins (subscriber, #3577)
In reply to: Reconsidering network channels by cventers
Parent article: Reconsidering network channels

some people already want a total absence of anything like netfilter.
by this I don't just mean being able to turn it off in .config, but also that netfilter requirements do not impact upon the structure of the driver and hence the speed of the NIC.

as people in netdev mentioned (more in the RDMA threads than netchannels), nobody in their right mind would ever dream of using netfilter on their sub 10microsecond cluster interconnects.
so users are already split into two camps - those who want to use fast hardware, and those with gigE and slower who might want to do routing and netfiltering. as low latency hardware like Infiniband and Myrinet goes more mainstream this split will become more evident.

if netchannels can only be architected so that it's usefully fast when netfilter isn't required then that's more than fine for the whole class of users who already turn off netfilter. it can go into the kernel so that netchannels only appears when netfilter is off, and people who care about performance (like me) would probably use it.
anybody who turns off netfilter in the .config already knows what they are doing and what they are losing when they do it.

as netfilter already can be turned off it follows that you should be able to write drivers and infrastructure that only works when netfilter is off. I don't see a problem with this... ???

cheers,
robin

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