> > Define 'direct sockets' firstly.
> Direct Sockets is the ablity by which the application(using sockets)
> can use the hardwares features to provide connection, flow control,
> etc.,instead of the TCP and IP software module. A typical hardware
> technology is Infiniband . In Infiniband, the hardware supports IPv6 . For
> this type of devices there is no need for software TCP/IP. But for
> networking application, which mostly uses sockets, there is a performance
> penalty with using software TCP/IP over this hardware.
>
> > I have seen several lines of attack on very high bandwidth devices.
> > Firstly
> > the linux projects a while ago doing usermode message passing directly
> > over
> > network cards for ultra low latency. Secondly there was a VI based project
> > that was mostly driven from userspace.
> >
> The application needs to rewritten to use VIPL, but if we could
> provide a sockets over VI (or Sockets over IB), then the existing
> applications can run with a known environment.
>
>
> > One thing that remains unresolved is the question as to whether the very
> > low
> > cost Linux syscalls and zero copy are enough to achieve this using a
> > conventional socket API and the kernel space, or whether a hybrid direct
> > access setup is actually needed.
> >
> My point is that if the hardware is capable of doing TCP/IP , we
> should let the sockets layer talk directly to it (direct sockets). Thereby
> the application which uses the sockets will get better performance.
Doesn't this bypass all of the network security controls? Granted - it is
completely reasonable in a dedicated environment, but I would think the
security loss would prevent it from being used for most usage.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil
Any opinions expressed are solely my own.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 07 2001 - 21:00:18 EST