Re: XTP: A better TCP than TCP

Greg Lindahl (lindahl@cs.virginia.edu)
Thu, 3 Jun 1999 13:49:30 -0400 (EDT)

> I think a much more interesting protocol to have in the kernel would
> be Bell Labs' IL. It's implemented in Plan 9, and they say they are
> very happy with its performance. It's a sequenced packet protocol,
> ideal for NFS, CORBA messages and pretty much anything which currently
> either implements its own out-of-order + retransmit strategy over UDP
> or puts packet boundaries into TCP.

Note that IL has no flow control. You may not think you need flow
control, but the minute you have several people talking to 1 at high
speed, life gets interesting. A group I used to work for (Legion) had
its own IL-like protocol, and we finally decided that TCP's flow
control was a huge win locally (our Legion-MPI programs were
overrunning the 64k OS buffers), and TCP's adaptive stuff was far
superior over WANs.

On the other hand, it's pretty trivial to pass whole messages over TCP.

-- greg

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/