Re: Linux XIA - merge proposal

From: Michel Machado
Date: Tue Mar 03 2015 - 19:32:13 EST


Hi Daniel,

We're fine with clearly marking Linux XIA as being under staging
as well as helping to define this review process for network stacks.

With regard to staging, the code there is usually horrible and I'm
not sure anyone really looks there, that would mitigate the review
problem to the time when you try to get it out from there, so I'm
not sure it brings anything. ;)

I suggested staging as a way to incrementally review the code. XIA is very modular, each component is a kernel module. So one can review a kernel module at a time. My intention is to lower the review burden as much as I can. I'm open to suggestions to work this out.

+1 on what Eric said, would have also been nice if you had clearly
described in your mail (w/o buzz words) what it is and what it does.

XIA is not an incremental design over IP, and a reasonable explanation would've made my e-mail exceeding large. Our wiki has a lot content explaining the design as well as demoing it, and I can answer questions here, or through another communication medium that you guys feel comfortable.

Are you trying to introduce a new network stack as an alternative
to the current one, e.g. something like FreeBSD's netgraph?

I'm trying to introduce a new network stack that enables one to implement network designs that are incompatible with IP for a reason or another. On top of that, these designs, once ported to Linux XIA, could be combined to work together as we tried to highlight in the following demo:

https://github.com/AltraMayor/XIA-for-Linux/wiki/An-exemplifying-demo

There're a good number of designs in the literature that hasn't seen the sun light because they are hard to experiment with since they are not compatible with IP. Our hope is to bring these designs to life and have a true evaluation of them. That is, we hope that Linux XIA will enable the community at large to crowdsource the future Internet. We work this vision out in this technical report:

http://www.cs.bu.edu/techreports/pdf/2015-001-linux-xia.pdf

[ ]'s
Michel Machado
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/