[Cerowrt-devel] LCA 2018 talk available

[Joel Wirāmu Pauling]

it's late /throughput/latency/%s

On 15 February 2018 at 00:45, Joel Wirāmu Pauling <joel at aenertia.net> wrote:
> Aquantia 10GBase-T TB3 self powered, adapters are now available. They
> support 803.11bz.
>
> Again it's not the speed, it's the throughput. TB3 delivers near to
> what my local x86 can do in terms of throughput. Also network should
> never be slower than disc. Since NVME has been around this is
> no-longer true. It's an unnatural order of things.
>
> Interestingly the NVME stuff came about by a competing teams during
> the same time as Lightpeak. They share many underlying philosophies.
>
> --
>
> Cabling is the issue in my mind right now. Every laptop with tb3 ports
> has 10G+ capability, if passive optical long run was cheap and easily
> available for tb3 then half the problem would already be solved.
>
> Maybe 10G over cat6a will be ok as the evolution. But you have to go
> to cat8 to get anything beyond 10G... so the cabling situation and
> incentive to upgrade to future-proof isn't there.
>
> On 15 February 2018 at 00:33, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Jan 2018, Joel Wirāmu Pauling wrote:
>>
>>> Kia Ora (Hi in Māori).
>>>
>>> Today I delivered my talk on 10Gbit(+) in the home at Linuxconf
>>> Australasia. Some specific shout outs to those on the list who helped form
>>> some of the content and especially for the continued efforts with FLENT
>>> which I have been making extensive use of both professionally and
>>> privately.
>>>
>>> Hopefully this is of some interest and use to people on the list.
>>>
>>> https://github.com/aenertia/lca2018-talk/tree/talk
>>
>>
>> Great presentation, thanks.
>>
>> Some feedback. I have been told MOCA is widely used in USA, and this is
>> in-house coax cabling used for providing IP based services in multiple
>> rooms.
>>
>> http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-set-up-a-coax-MoCA-network/
>>
>> Now, this doesn't have much to do with your 10GE talk as it's not going to
>> be that fast, but anyway. So back to > 1GE speeds.
>>
>> It seems to me that 1GE is good enough for a lot of user needs. It's over
>> 100 megabyte/s, most HDDs won't even transfer faster than this. Most devices
>> do not have anything faster than 1GE, so it's a chicken and egg problem. I
>> have a 100EUR fanless managable 24 port switch with 4 SFP ports. I imagine
>> anything faster than this would require fans and would bring up the cost a
>> lot.
>>
>> It would be ideal to have a 24 port 1GE + 4 (or 8) ports of 1/2.5/5/10GE for
>> incremental migration, but I have 0 things in my home that speaks anything
>> faster than 1GBASE-T (with RJ45 connector). I do have SFP+ based NIC cards
>> and DAC cables, but I don't even use them (apart from occasional testing).
>>
>> The upgrade was from 100BASE-T to 1GBASE-T was fairly cheap and addressed a
>> wide need, since 10-11 megabyte/s was slower than most HDDs even 15-20 years
>> ago. Today, 100-110megabyte/s at 1GBASE-T speeds is actually still quite
>> decent, and most people don't have huge amounts of data to move around. So
>> for most people, anything faster than 1GBASE-T doesn't address a problem
>> they actually have. Yes, for people handling 4k footage and doing video
>> editing etc, they need faster. But most people don't. For them a 8-24 port
>> 1GBASE-T switch is fine, and provides a networking solution that is not
>> bottlenecking them in any significant fashion.
>>
>> 2.5G and 5G would be a good compromise, but it seems to be stuck in
>> chicken/egg problem space. Most people actually don't even wire their
>> computers today, it's all wifi, and even if they do wire them, the only NIC
>> available is 1GBASE-T based.
>>
>> The iMac Pro is the first prosumer device I have seen that actually supports
>> faster networking. If Apple or someone else actually released a thunderbolt
>> based NIC that was decently sized/priced that did support 2.5G or 5GBASE-T,
>> then this chicken/egg problem could perhaps be solved. Most people don't
>> feel the need to connect these kinds of things to their laptop:
>>
>> https://www.startech.com/uk/Networking-IO/Adapter-Cards/thunderbolt-3-10-gbe-nic-chassis~BNDTB310GNDP
>> https://www.akitio.com/adapters/thunder2-10g-network-adapter
>> https://www.promise.com/Products/SANLink/SANLink2/10G-BaseT
>>
>> http://www.tehutinetworks.net/?t=LV&L1=3&L2=0&L3=0&L7=157 is interesting, as
>> this is not huge. It also does 2.5G and 5G.
>>
>> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12422/akitios-thunder3-10g-adapter-now-available
>>
>> 300USD is still a significant chunk of money compared to the 29USD 1GBASE-T
>> thunderbolt2 adapter that Apple sells.
>>
>> But still, with these kinds of products, there might be hope!
>>
>> --
>> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se