1999-01-19 05:47:32

by Chuck Lever

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: TCP Splice alleviates proxy bottleneck

On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 [email protected] wrote:

> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 23:36:12 -0500 (EST)
> From: [email protected]
> To: Alan Cox <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: TCP Splice alleviates proxy bottleneck
>
> Alan Cox writes:
> > From: [email protected] (Alan Cox)
> > To: [email protected]
> > Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
> > Subject: Re: TCP Splice alleviates proxy bottleneck
> > Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 14:53:14 +0000 (GMT)
> >
> >> Their work on TCP Splice gives the efficiency of IP masquerading, yea,
> >> even that of simple IP forwarding, to processes with the capabilities
> >> of application level proxies.
> >
> > Their ? Having looked at the reference I'd like Larry McVoy's opinion on
> > its originality 8)
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to Larry McVoy's
> paper "Splice - a push pull I/O model for Unix" dated 6/24/98 [1]?
>
> If so, the model he presents is a bit different than theirs. A cursory
> reading of his paper indicates to me that his model is intended to be
> more general, i.e. not intended purely for TCP/IP, and as such it (rightly)
> glosses over most of the TCP/IP-specific issues that Pravin and Maltz
> address in their paper dated 3/17/98 [2]. They also have the advantage of
> having implemented their ideas.

Druschel and Pai *have* implemented IO-Lite, which seems similar in spirit
to McVoy's ideas. see:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~vivek/IO-Lite/TR97-294.ps

i think this would be a great starting place for what you have in mind. a
combination of the general zero-copy I/O semantics and the TCP-specific
improvements could be very slick.

> References:
>
> [1] http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/splice.ps
> [2] http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/pravin/TR-21139.ps.gz

- Chuck Lever
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