Live data from Hacker News

Building my own network stack

blog.lyc8503.net

51–60 of 102 posts

Re: Building my own network stack

#51
post #47

I would seriously recommend against building your own network stack for production use. Or writing your own web server for production use. Or database (whatever SQL or NoSQL) also for production use. These sort of things are more complicated than you could expect and have plentiful pitfalls. Whatever you can do in reasonable amount of time is probably not that good compared to existing alternatives. If you have actua…

[flagged]

Re: Building my own network stack

#52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t you JIT- generate the code and then run the verification?

Because after proper verification you very much aren't at JIT territory. Take the network stack. From my memories a proper commercial test suit from say Defensics is from a few thousand to tens of thousand cases. For each of Ethernet, IP, TCP and UDP. Any decent coverage however fast will take some time. Most likely lot more than you want with just in time...

Yeah, the cost of running the test suite every time an agent generates code JIT would be the killer for running it at scale. I didn't even get into practicality of that approach too much because the gist of it for me was the question of agents writing code JIT having security benefits (?) - the verification thing is a sidetrack.

Certainly, adding agentic JIT code invites more complexity to properly do it, so what are the benefits that call for introducing it.

Re: Building my own network stack

#53
post #19
post #6

Earlier 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…

What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.

The pursuit is performative and pretentious, in much the same way as body culture on Instagram. It’s about collecting achievements in an imaginary social game, and then bragging about it, while insisting that it’s not like that at all but some modern pathway to enlightenment.

To be clear, I’m not saying that people don’t genuinely achieve many of these things; they do. Many Instagram models also genuinely have spectacular bodies. It’s not about whether, but about why they are doing this, and the culture surrounding all of it.

Re: Building my own network stack

#54
post #51
post #47

I would seriously recommend against building your own network stack for production use. Or writing your own web server for production use. Or database (whatever SQL or NoSQL) also for production use. These sort of things are more complicated than you could expect and have plentiful pitfalls. Whatever you can do in reasonable amount of time is probably not that good compared to existing alternatives. If you have actua…

[flagged]

holy shit. I was just tinkering with my production Laravel stack serving thousands in production trying to figure out how to improve worker concurrency (running out of RAM) and I encounter a random comment on HN which appears to solve my exact problem. This is so serendipitous

Re: Building my own network stack

#55
This article might be a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's actually something I've been thinking seriously about for a while. I can imagine a future where every country and company writes their own operating system and that might actually be a very good thing. There is a security advantage in not using popular technology stacks and rebuilding everything public-facing in-house. Because with Mythos-level AI capabilities, it is almost guaranteed that anyone with access to Mythos/Cyber can find a zero day in your stack. If your stack is proprietary and bespoke with no public access to source code it's much harder to find vulnerabilities, because they can only probe your public facing interfaces.

Re: Building my own network stack

#56
post #51
post #47

I would seriously recommend against building your own network stack for production use. Or writing your own web server for production use. Or database (whatever SQL or NoSQL) also for production use. These sort of things are more complicated than you could expect and have plentiful pitfalls. Whatever you can do in reasonable amount of time is probably not that good compared to existing alternatives. If you have actua…

[flagged]

What is up with the README?

Re: Building my own network stack

#57
The real nightmare scenario is not just finding a vulnerability in the Linux network stack but finding vulnerabilities at the protocol level in TCP/IP itself or HTTP. That’s a problem that cannot be fixed. Has there ever been a precedent for this in computing?

Re: Building my own network stack

#60

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 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. :)

The plant computer wasn't a DCS. I think it was a DEC. It gathered data from the control systems and instrumentation and had a bespoke in memory realtime-ish database. That database was then partially replicated down to the Sun workstations (code the 23 year old me wrote). Then the browser consumed that via a unix shared memory interface.
Post reply on HN