[Bloat] [Cerowrt-devel] wireguard almost takes a bullet

[David P. Reed]

Dave -
 
I've spent a fair amount of time orbiting the FreeBSD community over the past few years. It's not as sad as you might think.
However, the networking portion of FreeBSD community is quite differently organized than it is in Linux.
 
What tends to shape Linux and FreeBSD, etc. are the money sources that flow into the communities. Of course Linux is quite independently wealthy now. The senior executives of the Linux Foundation are paid nearly a million dollars a year, each.  Which just indicates that major corporations are seriously interested in controlling the evolution of Linux (not the Gnu part, the part that has Linus Torvalds at its center).
 
FreeBSD, in contrast, is a loose alliance of what you might call "embedded hardware vendors" like NetApp as an example. They value an open, portable, efficient operating environment, but not for servers, laptops or smartphones.
 
They overlap at the intersection of network routing and storage platforms, where Linux doesn't seem to fit well, except in the case of "home routers".
 
At least that's my view. The major controllers of architectural elements are not terribly interested in FreeBSD's positive qualities. FreeBSD is not very visible at Intel and ARM at all, interms of their product planning. IBM has no "Power" FreeBSD.
 
Take for example, bufferbloat as an issue that routing and switching hardware ought to address. This is a serious weakness in the FreeBSD community (where it should matter!) There's not been much demand by the major corporate spenders on FreeBSD in fixing bufferbloat. But then again, there's not been much visibility regarding bufferbloat in the IETF, either. I'm not sure Torvalds has ever even heard of it (and I suspect he would try to argue it isn't a problem at all, given his tendency to not think clearly about systems scale issues, so what's caused Linux to even bother is the fringes in OpenWRT land and mesh networking land, plus Jim Gettys).
 
Anyway, FreeBSD and FreeRTOS and a few other very strong but small communities have solutions that are far better for their actual needs than the behemoth mess that Linux has become. And for those communities, they work very well. They are disentangled from Gnu, which is both a good and a bad thing depending on your perspective.
 
I just spent 9 months trying to get a very tiny fix to the Linux kernel into the mainline kernel. I actually gave up, because it seemed utterly pointless, even though it was clearly a design error that I was fixing, and I was trying to meet all the constraints on patches. No one was fighting me, no one said it was wrong. I found the problem in a personal research project where it was a blocking bug, so I had to maintain it as an add-on private patch (and I still do) that I needed to verify every release of the Linux kernel. Why is this? Well, it shows how Linux excludes ideas by the very bureaucracy of its management structure. (and I'd suggest that the mess that "init" has turned into in the OS, which the kernel actually requires in order to be useful, called "systemd", is an example of how not to modularize a portable OS kernel).
 
So FreeBSD, compared to Linux, in some ways, is far more pleasant to deal with. The community doesn't have rude and clueless and entitled members like Torvalds and Alan Cox have been. It isn't being driven by a consortium of F100 companies in a near-cartel.
 
So there are pluses and minuses. I suspect this is why many, many Linux developers actually use macOS as their personal computer for development. A paradox, given that macOS is completely proprietary.
 
 
 
On Sunday, March 28, 2021 11:56am, "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com> said:



> I am sad about the state of freebsd today, and of companies
> contracting outside the authors of the code to get crappy things
> committed without review and testing.
> 
> https://lwn.net/Articles/850757/
> 
> (long rant of mine in the comments).
> 
> My hat is off to jason for sinking a frantic week into vastly
> improving that wireguard implementation, and I hope he and his team
> gets caught up on sleep now.
> 
> --
> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
> relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled" - Richard Feynman
> 
> dave at taht.net <Dave Täht> CTO, TekLibre, LLC Tel: 1-831-435-0729
> _______________________________________________
> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> 
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