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Protocol Wars

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Re: Protocol Wars

#41

Post by leansensei »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #27
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

So.... which will come first, "the year of IPv6" or "the year of linux desktop"? :)

I know you are joking but I don't get the longevity of this joke. I've been running Debian with XFCE for more than 12 years, on PCs custom-built and branded, and on laptops both of enterprise quality and retail junk. Heck, our entire B2B commerce business runs the same setup, with far fewer (read: zero) issues compared to when we were using Windows 98, 98SE, XP SP3, 7, Vista, and 10, at which point we declined Microsoft's telemetry and ads and forced OneDrive shenanigans and promptly switched everyone to Debian+XFCE.

99.9% of the time, modern Linux works out of the box everytime.

So I'd say it's on par with Windows versions, except I practically never need to download install drivers, or to face ads.

Maybe I'm on a different planet on which the year of the Linux desktop has arrived for longer than a decade.

Re: Protocol Wars

#42

Post by neysofu »

speed_spread wrote: post #31
PinguTS wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, even TCP is going to be replaced. I just want to remind the initial work of Google on QUIC, which now has become some standard. It is based on UDP and re-defining TCP features based on UDP together with cryptography and by allowing IP changes to allow moving clients.

TCP is fine and isn't going anywhere. QUIC is an overengineered contraption that only exists to serve more ads. SSH doesn't need it. Postgres doesn't need it. Nobody needs QUIC except Google.

QUIC is not without defects, I'm with you there, but almost almost any "web-scale" company dealing with a lot of cellular connections would disagree with your statement. Uber, Verizon, Cloudflare, Meta, Fastly, among others, some of which have reported very significant latency reductions.

Re: Protocol Wars

#43

Post by 867-5309 »

londons_explore wrote: post #37
PinguTS wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, even TCP is going to be replaced. I just want to remind the initial work of Google on QUIC, which now has become some standard. It is based on UDP and re-defining TCP features based on UDP together with cryptography and by allowing IP changes to allow moving clients.

And yet, even with QUIC and a brand new Google phone on a Google wifi network and a Google Fi cell connection, I still can't walk away from my house and have a video call migrate from wifi to 5G without the audio glitching and dropping frames. All the mobility benefits of QUIC mean nothing when the rest of the software stack isn't designed to let it work.

that's never going to be a seamless transition. the fact the transition happens automatically is a marvel in itself

Re: Protocol Wars

#44

Post by [deleted] »

talideon wrote: post #20
greyface- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TCP becomes unusable under interplanetary latencies; leaving the planet will force us to transition off of it.

Nah. The main impetus to achieve FTL communication will be because it'll be easier than shifting people off of TCP.

[deleted]

Re: Protocol Wars

#45

Post by bee_rider »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

This explains my childhood video game woes in the 90s. I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against. Curiously despite being a network…

I feel like late 90’s/early 00’s, on the other hand, were the ideal time to learn a little bit about networking as a kid. You only really needed to learn about IP addresses and NAT.

I vaguely remember Age of Empires had some options for more esoteric network options, but it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that they were hopeless.

Earlier, as you mention, networking was for grown-ups to figure out only. Nowadays you don’t need to learn anything about networks to play most AAA games (I bet some folks learned a lot setting up Minecraft servers though).

Re: Protocol Wars

#46

Post by doctor_eval »

eternityforest wrote: post #38

I wish we could start over and redesign everything from Ethernet up to TLS with the lessons we now understand. So many layers could be merged, security could be so much easier, IP addressing hassles could be unnecessary. But all the stuff that seems obvious now couldn't have been learned without the decades of kind of terrible hackery that is OSI and the associated awful stuff like DNS. I'm not sure what the moral of…

I wonder if we will see more of the network layer move into the application layer, like what I think happened with QUIC.

I’m not really a network guy, but the thing I find interesting about QUIC is that it’s upgradable. Normalising regular browser updates was a godsend for the web, while TCP/IP remains hard to upgrade because you still, in 2023, have to upgrade your whole OS.

Protocols like TLS that sit outside the OS seem to have been much more dynamic, and that too is the promise of QUIC. It might be interesting to find operating system primitives that enable use of the networking hardware without having to implement the protocol itself. Although that stuff is above my pay grade.

Re: Protocol Wars

#47

Post by actionfromafar »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

This explains my childhood video game woes in the 90s. I'd have friends over, and we'd want to play DOOM multiplayer. The only problem was that as kids we had no idea how networking worked. We'd fiddle around on the Windows networking setup, and there'd be a list of protocols like IP and IPX. Words like Token Ring would appear. Just a blur that 15 year old kid had no chance against. Curiously despite being a network…

Yep, IPX just worked. It was sort of like how IPv6 auto-assign is now. Except IPX worked.

Re: Protocol Wars

#48

Post by aardvark179 »

talideon wrote: post #20
greyface- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TCP becomes unusable under interplanetary latencies; leaving the planet will force us to transition off of it.

Nah. The main impetus to achieve FTL communication will be because it'll be easier than shifting people off of TCP.

It’s all fun and games until you get an ACK before you sent the SYN.

Re: Protocol Wars

#49

Post by School-Cotton »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #27
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

So.... which will come first, "the year of IPv6" or "the year of linux desktop"? :)

The year of IPv6 is already here, my home is already on IPv6 as is my mobile provider. Normal ISP and mobile provider in New York, not anything particularly geeky.

From Google you can see that IPv6 usage is around 40% now and steadily increasing: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Re: Protocol Wars

#50

Post by londons_explore »

867-5309 wrote: post #43
londons_explore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, even with QUIC and a brand new Google phone on a Google wifi network and a Google Fi cell connection, I still can't walk away from my house and have a video call migrate from wifi to 5G without the audio glitching and dropping frames. All the mobility benefits of QUIC mean nothing when the rest of the software stack isn't designed to let it work.

that's never going to be a seamless transition. the fact the transition happens automatically is a marvel in itself

It 100% could be. Changes you'd need are:

* Android lets an application talk over both wifi and 5G at the same time.

* Android exposes information about signal strength on a per packet basis, so that the application can decide at some point that too many packets are too close to not being received, so it's time to send data over 5G in addition. It should also expose data about packet retransmissions at the physical layer (ie. collisions and backoff times due to another device using the media).

* When the 5G data flow is established and channel parameters like delay and loss are characterized, then stop sending data over wifi.

* And since this process never involved delaying any data by a roundtrip, nor any packet loss, there is no need to drop any frames.

Note that the cell network has been able to handoff voice calls from one cell tower to another without glitches since the 80's!.

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