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Hardware Headaches Inevitable?
JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."
What they're likely talking about is technology like Chimney, which, barring lawsuits, will be coming out in or around the time of Windows Vista. Effectively, instead of the TCP/IP stack coming from the OS and running on the main processor, the network card will have a processor and memory and run the TCP/IP stack there. This increases efficiency and reduces reduces latency because the main CPU doesn't have to get involved as much. In the future we will probably see things like SSL encryption being performed on the card as well.
What happens now (on windows) is that applications talk to winsock. Winsock sends the data to kernel mode code including tcpip.sys. From there, it ends up in ndis.sys and then the driver for your network card before being sent to the card.
What this new thing means is that applications send the data to winsock which hands it directly to a new kind of network card/driver which takes the data and header info and creates the TCP/UDP and IP packets on the card itself in card firmware. From there, the card wraps it up in the lower level protocols and then puts it out over the wire (or air if its wireless)