OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

Posted Jul 24, 2006 6:15 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: OLS: A proposal for a new networking API by flewellyn
Parent article: OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

The way things go everything should be network capable.

In fact there was a group that did a presentation this year at the Usenix conference that did something very odd with computers buses and IP.

Basicly they made the entire computer and all the communication run IP.
See http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix06/tech/ben-yehuda.html

Of course it's closed to non-members until next year.. (Is anybody here a member?)

The way things are going pretty soon ethernet networks will be faster then local disk I/O. If latencies decrease along with that, or something like that, then shared memory scemes may start to work.

Distributed operating systems maybe? Or something like treating a small cluster of machines as a single Numa machine with single kernel?

If most IPC stuff uses something that could just as easily be local as network'd then that would make something like that more easily workable. Like how X is mostly network transparent.

er.. or something like that.

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OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

Posted Jul 24, 2006 9:39 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

I am a member and went and read the paper.

what they did was to create a pci card that claimed to be a VGA/keyboard/mouse card and remoted that out to another machine via IP (the purpose being to investigate the potential for more 'legacy free' motherboards, including being free of any graphics, keybard, usb, IDE, etc ports)

they found a 40-60% performance hit for doing so, but point out that normal sysadmin tasks don't use these channels so it was deemed acceptable.

while this is a very interesting idea for server manufacturers (and performance can be improved with a custom ASIC instead of the slow FPGA)it's of much less interest for home use (where you don't normally have another machine to serve as the head for your systems, and gamers aren't willing to sacrafice any performance)

while an interesting paper it doesn't seem to be very relavent to the issues being dicussed here.

OLS: A proposal for a new networking API

Posted Jul 24, 2006 10:03 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

ah, I see.

Thank you. I was curious about what exactly they were talking about.

Old news?

Posted Aug 4, 2006 5:36 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

I'm fairly sure I've seen cards on the market that do exactly that - and have for a while. The IBM RSA (Remote Supervisor Adapter) comes to mind, and I think Dell do something similar for their servers.

(By the way: I WANT ONE VERY BADLY. I hate the way x86 servers - even Intel server boards etc - can't handle serial console access for POST and BIOS. It's completely retarded, and one area where Sun has been trouncing `PC' servers for years.).

There are also older approaches, such as the `PC Weasel' VGA+keyboard -> serial console cards that've been around for yonks.

That said, you just wrote a summary, so I'm sure there's more in the details.