Most of the changes Netflix is making aren't really directly copyable. A lot of it is related to or tied to the virtual memory model, and Linux's model is different.

However, publicizing the ideas and the results is valuable to other operating systems even without the code. If you're building something on Linux (or Windows? or ?) that could benefit from kTLS (including NIC accelerated kTLS), knowing it can work and having a roadmap is great. You would still need to do the plumbing, but you could skip a lot of the design. Being able to look at the code is nice too.

And, if you're willing to try FreeBSD + nginx, you could jump directly to that. If you're deploying something with similar performance characteristics to a CDN box, it's probably a very narrow application, and doesn't need to run on the same stack as the rest of your fleet.

>small compared to the number of Linux users

Not to mention all the Minix and NucleusRTOS Users ;)

Haha exactly :) my own definition of a user of an operating system is someone who know what operating system they are using. So a playstation and a Netflix user would not count as freebsd users (they are not using FreeBSD, they are using a playstation). Netflix engineers are the FreeBSD users. Pfsense and freenas users certainly counts ;)