Re: [9fans] Van Jacobsen's network stack restructure

[Dave Eckhardt <davide+p9@cs.cmu.edu>]

One way to look at VJ's proposal is as a way for every application
on a machine to break modularity and do its own TCP to increase
performance.  From time to time this has been big fun in the
supercomputing arena (for example, back when "gigabit networking"
was an NSF-funded research challenge).  Of course, there are problems
when network connections stop being file descriptors like everything
else.

In terms of Plan 9 maybe there is a different message.  We like
TCP connections being files in a small file system, but does that
file system *have* to be provided by the kernel?  If he can do
it with good performance, the result would be more fun to debug
and replace.

Dave Eckhardt