What they don't teach you about sockets

Re:What they don't teach you about sockets by 5e92cb50239222b on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @03:11PM (#32242579)

"Nearly complete"? No matter how deep your knowledge is, you're only scratching the surface. To pick a small example, there's something like 20 TCP congestion avoidance algorithms alone (many are available in the mainline Linux kernel, and they can be picked depending on the task and network at hand), and I believe it took something like a decade of research, trial and error to solve the bufferbloat problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control

https://lwn.net/Articles/616241/

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Re:What they don't teach you about sockets by hn_go_brrrrr on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @03:25PM (#32242765)

Only CUBIC and BBR seem to have any meaningful usage, however: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~ayush/images/sigmetrics2020-gor...

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Re:What they don't teach you about sockets by icedchai on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @03:56PM (#32243154)

I tried out BBR on a system that had a ton of packet loss. It made a tremendous difference!

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Re:What they don't teach you about sockets by n_kr on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @04:53PM (#32243855)

> No matter how deep your knowledge is, you're only scratching the surface.

I understand this is just emphasis, but no, its not magic, its not innate ability, its just software man! If you have dug deep enough, and understood it, that's it. Key phrase is IMO 'understood', but that's universal.

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Re:What they don't teach you about sockets by aflag on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @07:07PM (#32245206)

I think the point is that it may be impossible for a single human to have "nearly complete understanding" of how the networking stack work. But maybe what was meant was nearly complete understanding of the fundamentals. That's certainly achievable. But networking in the kernel is a beast of a thing with specialists in small parts of it. But I don't think there's a single human that know nearly all that those specialists know combined.

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