News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast. Parent comment

Re:Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast by peterwwillis on Monday March 18, 2019 @02:38PM (#19423799)
Everything should just be fast, but it usually isn't. So how are you going to deal with that as a business? Hire kernel hackers and spend expensive time and money to fine-tune one version of a kernel that'll never go upstream? Or pay a vendor for a really fast NIC and integrate it into your app?

(If you're Google, you hire the kernel hackers, but if you're trying to make money off a product and ship it next quarter, you buy the NIC)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast by CoolGuySteve on Monday March 18, 2019 @02:56PM (#19423983)
Well right now everyone who cares about latency (including me) is spending time integrating some kind of kernel bypass library into their application that's custom and/or proprietary to a single card vendor and often pretty finicky to configure and integrate correctly.

It's a massive waste of resources. If the kernel could figure out DRI for graphics then they can figure out universal passthrough networking. All the bypass libraries seem to use the same buffer pool + spinlock slot architecture already.

And by your logic, how does anything ever get into the kernel? Nobody should ever contribute anything because "upstream".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast by peterwwillis on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:23PM (#19424260)
I'm just saying that fixing the kernel is unlikely to happen unless it's in someone's business interest, and it's usually not. Hell, I bet there's kernel forks out there where people have already solved this, but it won't go upstream, because lawyers.
[ Parent | on HN ]