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

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

#81

Post by coryrc »

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…

It starts out simple :-).

Then you realize doing some action ends up being O(n^2) so you add some workaround in your switch and cache some things. And you know what they say about cache invalidation. And vendor A implemented it wrong in 1993 so you have a special case for their systems. And then you want to handle abuse cases. And authentication. And you're competing against the whole rest of the world and your thing isn't enough better.

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

#82

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

wayfinder wrote: post #64
mintplant wrote: post #17

Oh, I was hoping this would be something built more directly over Ethernet, rather than on top of UDP/IP (if I'm understanding the layer diagram correctly). I've been working with Ethernet devices a lot lately, using the network as a communication bus, essentially. I find that there's a lot of complexity that we simply don't need: ARP, DHCP, DNS... So many points of failure. We know all the devices on our LAN and the…

Ah yes, instead of going to google.com or 192.168.1.1 or adding a printer connected to my Wi-Fi, let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses…

> let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses

Yeah, well, you've basically described IPv6.

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

#83

Post by bauruine »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #82
wayfinder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, instead of going to google.com or 192.168.1.1 or adding a printer connected to my Wi-Fi, let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses…

> let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses Yeah, well, you've basically described IPv6.

rfc4941 is from 2011 if you use an OS that isn't using it you have bigger problems.

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

#84

Post by tommiegannert »

smokefoot wrote: post #22

I don’t understand networking all that well. Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration?

SDN just means reconfiguring things that used to be manually configured on-the-fly.

E.g. instead of your little server setting firewall rules locally, it tells the router what traffic to allow. That router, in turn, tells upstream about its needs, and so on. Or a server reports its load, and the routers do active load balancing. The hardware wires are still there, as always.

Re. hardware acceleration, I think the earliest form of this was moving the checksum computation [1] from the CPU to the network device, even though the networking device didn't really know about the protocol it was doing the checksum for.

In both, it's just about parallelizing workloads, the same we do with microservices at the upper levels of the stack. Natural progression of distributed systems, with fancy names attached.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...

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

#85

Post by DoingIsLearning »

up2isomorphism wrote: post #74

When you have enough scale you can claim a certain particular way of doing things are better than the others, which in most cases is just one way of doing things. This is what we see here.

Same thing goes for their single monolith repository philosophy.

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

#86

Post by thereisnospork »

ooterness wrote: post #66
MiddleMan5 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IP addresses have structure because a single ISP buys a contiguous block, like 123.234.*.*. A simple routing table sends that whole block to a single network port. The table required for the whole Internet is large, but not gigabytes. You can't route by MAC-address because it's effectively random. You'd have to store the port number for every device separately. This works fine at LAN scale, but not for the whole Inte…

>You can't route by MAC-address because it's effectively random. You'd have to store the port number for every device separately. This works fine at LAN scale, but not for the whole Internet.

Not that I see any advantages to the approach but it's almost workable(?), if a little silly, at internet scale:

If every device had a 64byte ID, guesstimating 10billion people * 100 devices/head gets us a 'measly' 64TB of storage. Double that to include routing info gets us to ~128TB. A bit much to be practical, but not entirely insane either.

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

#87

Post by em-bee »

ooterness wrote: post #66
MiddleMan5 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IP addresses have structure because a single ISP buys a contiguous block, like 123.234.*.*. A simple routing table sends that whole block to a single network port. The table required for the whole Internet is large, but not gigabytes. You can't route by MAC-address because it's effectively random. You'd have to store the port number for every device separately. This works fine at LAN scale, but not for the whole Inte…

MAC addresses being random is a historical accident (because of hardware limitations). today we can define them in software. and just like we have link-local addresses we could self-assign link-local MAC addresses.

and i think the self assigning protocol in link-local could even go a step further. instead of hard coding a subnet, it could detect the subnet by copying the one from its nearest neighbor. so start with a random address, talk to neighbor to learn the subnet (and netmask) in use and switch to a new address within that subnet. then possibly run DHCP and update the address again. for static addresses DHCP could identify hosts by its cryptographic host key (like the one for SSH)

when two subnets join one of them may have to adjust its prefix. more complex, but still possible.

subnet prefixes could still be assigned to organizations to avoid overlap on a global level.

i am sure i am missing some details but i think in general this could work.

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

#89

Post by sa46 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #82
wayfinder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, instead of going to google.com or 192.168.1.1 or adding a printer connected to my Wi-Fi, let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses…

> let me open my big yellow pages of globally unique MAC addresses Yeah, well, you've basically described IPv6.

How do networks manage the larger number of IPv6 addresses?

My cursory digging indicates that the secret sauce is to grant large IPv6 prefixes and delegate routing to the prefix. An informative-looking Reddit comment says there are 100k IPv6 prefixes (as of Oct. 2020), and each active route takes 1 KiB. [1]

So, IPv6 differs significantly from MAC addresses because you only need to track prefixes.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/j9twgq/how_much...

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

#90

Post by Double_a_92 »

Is it just me getting older / less smart, or did articles about products really start to sound like a jumbled mess or buzzwords lately?

What is "Hardware transport", what is "the ecosystem"? And then there is dozens of random products and technologies that I've never heard of...

This sounds more like a humble brag, than an article trying to inform people about technologies that might actually be useful to them.

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