My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TCP/IP stack - so we did in fact have to roll our own network stack.
Building my own network stack
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Building my own network stack
#12Prediction: as agentic code generation gets better, more and more code will be written JIT for it to be executed for security reasons. The engineer of the future is not only the one who uses agents to code, he uses agents to code each time "the" program is ran.
What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.
why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?
Re: Building my own network stack
#13Much more fun on microcontrollers!
Re: Building my own network stack
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.
why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?
Because the verification would also be done by something non deterministic and then that’s a paradox.
Re: Building my own network stack
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.
why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?
Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too.
I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.
Re: Building my own network stack
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should - write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system - learn 3-5 foreign languages - travel extensively - learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace - have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do - read…
Glad to see you two read only the title, not the article; that fulfills the cliche. And in your list you forgot taking a lecture in category theory.
Oh, the list wasn’t meant to be exhaustive. I also didn’t mention Homotopy Type Theory, Stoicism, and urban beekeeping.
Re: Building my own network stack
#17A while back I wrote an FPGA-based minimal network stack to work with the MRMAC hard IP of an AMD VC1902 with basically the same functionality: ARP, IPv4, ICMP Echo reply and UDP send/receive. I added the bare bare minimum to get UDP GRO working on the receiver side (Linux).
I also enjoyed the learning experience and works perfectly fine at up to 100G. But I definitely appreciate that I didn't have to go through the same pain under Linux where this stuff just works.
Re: Building my own network stack
#18Monoculture. It's like when all bananas used to be clones of each other and a disease wiped out the whole species.
Re: Building my own network stack
#19I disagree
So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should - write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system - learn 3-5 foreign languages - travel extensively - learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace - have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do - read…
What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.
Re: Building my own network stack
#20My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TC…
Hah, the first engineering job I had was on Ovation DCS doing power plant controls. That system traces the lineage to the WDPF systems.
Was the server you mention here the actual DCS? With the Motorola CPU's? Running vxworks? Pretty cool recognizing something niche that is still, vaguely familiar. :)