[Tipc-discussion] Re: status of UDP

[Mark H. <ma...@os...>]

On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 12:36, Jon Maloy wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> I have not tested TIPC/UDP it on 2.6 at all; last time I did it was
> with 2.4 on Vmware, not on SMP hardware. There it worked fine,
> but evidently something has changed in the kernel since then.
> 
> I have a feeling that we are fighting losing battle here, trying
> to use UDP in a way not anticipated in the Linux implementation.
> I also got the feedback from IETF a few months ago that UDP was
> very undesired as a carrier of TIPC, because it can be used over
> the Internet in an uncontrollable way, without the inherent flow control
> they want to se in all internet protocols. (Basically, I think they
> would like to kill UDP as a protocol altogether, if they could.)
> 
> If you somhow can find an easy workaround for the problem you
> see, it is ok to do it, otherwise I don't think we should spend much time
> on it. We should rather remove it completely for now, and at some later
> moment concentrate our effort to carry TIPC over TCP or SCTP.
> 

I don't think that there is an easy workaround.  I looked at the udp
code last year with the original tipc and 2.5 and saw the same
problems.  I tried to use a kernel thread to process the UDP messages so
it would be in a process context but never got it to work right.

Mark.



> What I have in mind is that we introduce a generic media
> adaptation that only has the task of conveying sent/received packets
> to/from a TIPC deamon in user space. It could be this daemon's task
> to set up connections and transport the packets from node to node,
> ensure encryption etc.
> Performance would of course suffer, but for Internet protocols execution
> time in the stack is not the dominating factor anyway.
> For transporting packages to/from such a deamon we can use ioctl,
> Netlink, or, why not, TIPC itself.
> 
> But these are future visions, I think.
> 
> Regards /Jon

-- 
Mark Haverkamp <ma...@os...>