Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware transport, to the ecosystem

Post by wmf » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 4:26 AM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #60

wmf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no interesting distinction between a "native" transport protocol and a transport protocol running on top of a UDP shim. The UDP header is probably necessary for ECMP.

? Maybe i'm misunderstanding what your trying to say, but there are major differences between an ethernet + IP transport and other transports like fiber channel (or even token ring, atm, etc) which has built into the lowest layers buffer crediting / flow control, retransmission, prioritization, etc. Sure you can build much of that higher in the stack but it requires everything in the network to be playing the same ga…

Post by wmf » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 4:31 AM UTC

StillBored wrote: post #65

Hmmm, so much of this looks like an attempt to solve the problems that were solved with fibre channel a couple decades back. Which I guess is standard NIH, with the advantage of not having to pay the FC consortium 95% HW margins. But still, you would think that some of those lessons could be learned before replacing it. AKA FC routes IP as one of its many protocols on top of the lower levels providing far more servic…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 4:50 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #73

StillBored wrote: post #65

Hmmm, so much of this looks like an attempt to solve the problems that were solved with fibre channel a couple decades back. Which I guess is standard NIH, with the advantage of not having to pay the FC consortium 95% HW margins. But still, you would think that some of those lessons could be learned before replacing it. AKA FC routes IP as one of its many protocols on top of the lower levels providing far more servic…

Maybe a better example would be Infiniband which is a simple and efficient protocol... but it's basically owned by Nvidia. For whatever reason Broadcom won't make Infiniband ASICs and Google doesn't want to be locked in to Nvidia so they have to use Ethernet.

Post by genmud » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 5:06 AM UTC

MiddleMan5 wrote: post #49

genmud wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't route MACs... you can't associate domain names to MACs... Maybe for a LAN that's fine, but for connecting devices between broadcast domains, it just doesn't cut it.

Why though? You can't route MAC because... ? Because ipv4 provides a higher entropy address? Because MAC is self-assigned and reduplication would require a higher level system? or just because we just don't use MAC addresses that way? I'm certain there are reasons IP came to live alongside/on top of MAC, but saying you can't do multi-hop routing with it just isn't true. If all the technologies of the Internet were re…

Post by kortilla » Wed, Oct 18, 2023, 5:26 AM UTC

MiddleMan5 wrote: post #76

blown_gasket wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0C:F9:31:D2:DB:51 AB:33:C6:C6:19:74 I used a MAC address generator to get those two, but I think two is enough to make the discussion. Current reality aside, would you be able to identify those with binary math as being on the same network device, different network devices, across the world? MAC addresses on physical NICs are provided by the manufacturer, sure you can adjust them but I think that leaves the good-fait…

So it seems like the primary use of IP, as you describe, is to define a way to narrow the search to sub address groups so as to not require enumerating every address in the scheme. Still, there's doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't just say "device 1 gets MAC 00:00:00:00:00:01" and "device 2 gets 00:00:00:00:00:02" and the gateway controller gets :::00 and there's a special address on :::FF that can be used to…