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Best TCP/IP Stack Implementation?
paultantk asks: "This mailing list suggests that the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack is sub-par. It was the best in the 90's, but not anymore. So the question is, which operating system now holds the title for the best TCP/IP stack implementation?"
That's easy. Windows.
mmm..mmmmm..mmmmMMHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Damn...couldn't keep a straight face. ^_^
Seriously, though, if FreeBSD is no longer king of the mountain, my vote would have to go with NetBSD (it's always been the BSDs, hasn't it?), although the term "best" is rather open-ended, and subject to serious variations of interpretation. Perhaps before we set about answering this question, we ought to decide just what we mean by "best".
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
you have to put things in context
security ? - OpenBSD / NetBSD / Linux
performance ? - MS Windows 2003 / Linux / FreeBSD
(windows has been showen to support very nice acceleration card NAPI on linux has been showen 2.6 kernel slower than 2.4 at the recent kernel summit and freeBSD is still up there on exsisting hardware the rewrite is about supporting new models )
Portability ? NetBSD / Linux / OpenBSD
context is everything
regards
John Jones
Agreed, I don't read that post to say that described the stack as "sub par".
I did notice something interesting. If you look through the sponsorships he received, a significant amount ($14,000) was pledged was by Pair Networks. They are one of the larger hosting providers in the U.S. and hundreds FreeBSD servers at their data center in Pittsburgh. It is unlikely that they would grant 14 stacks of high society at something they did not research and find to be of direct benefit. I am not an employee of Pair, but I have been a customer for seven years.
By the way, Pair's Mirrors are quite handy.
In the good old days before OpenTransport and well before OSX, we had MacTCP. It was just fantastic.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
- "my OS is better than yours, so therefore my stack is better".
- "I've got this obscure stack for my old/obsolete/obscure machine, so it r0x!"
- Linux, of course!
- OS X, of course!
etc..I'd be interested in seeing WHY a stack is better, and this means real data or stories like performance numbers or efficiency observations, etc.
On the other hand, machines built since 1998 have been fast enough and stacks have probably been optimized enough that we don't even notice anymore. For example, it was huge when Solaris 2.5.1 was replaced by Solaris 2.6; the stack was reworked because of "we're the dot in dot.com" web serving duties in 1997. However, those days people were still running SPARCstation 5/10/20's for their webs (read: 40MHz CPUs) and it made a difference. Today, your 500MHz+ CPUs don't really hiccup that much from stack inefficiencies. Sure, slashdot the darn box and you'll see some numbers, but the sites that are regularly hosting that kind of traffic are probably running heavier-duty machines.
My rant, anyway :-)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Well... it is in that Pair Networks are far from the biggest network (webhosting, in their context) company, yet they are contributing something which will be released under the BSD licence, hence truely free... and will be of benefit to all both large and small. So yes it is alturism but in a form which also benefits themselves, as all great alturism should do (spreading good amongst all should benefit yourself, however directly or indirectly).
So I say GO PAIR NETWORKS!
No, seriously. Vista apparently has a completely rewritten network stack that's supposed to build on the work done with Windows Server 2003 (offloading work to network hardware, primarily) and was designed for IPv6 from the ground up.
Since the TCP/IP stack is only as good as the operating system it's attached to, why don't we come right out and determine, once and for all, the best operating system ever created? I think this will be a grand, insightful discussion, completely devoid of flames.
rooooar
Without a doubt, DragonFlyBSD has the best TCP/IP stack. It already has all the RFC improvements that Andre wants to add. It has a correct working SACK implementation. DragonFlyBSD is a more stable faster version of FreeBSD. Why would anyone want to pay money to do what's already in DragonFlyBSD? I would encourage any FreeBSD user to just upgrade to DragonFlyBSD.