[e2e] end of interest

Joe Touch touch at ISI.EDU
Fri May 9 09:31:53 PDT 2008



John Day wrote:
> At 16:23 -0400 2008/05/08, Craig Partridge wrote:
...
>> I don't think it said don't bother touching TCP and below so much as said
>> they don't matter.  That's certainly what Van said in a more recent talk.
>> And I think it is right -- if you think you have a game changing paradigm
>> that can work over existing stuff but might work better over new stuff,
>> focus on your core idea -- if it works, the rest of the network will
>> morph to support it.
> 
> Some time ago, Microsoft had the same idea about dealing with having 
> half an operating system.  Didn't work for them, not going to work 
> here.  Overlays are building on sand, or trying to sweep the mess under 
> the layer.  They can't fix what is fundamentally an incomplete 
> architecture.

Does that go for virtual memory too?

IMO, overlays are as integral to networking as VM is to memory - 
something we didn't put into the original architecture, but isn't a 
stop-gap either.

VM, e.g., was originally to handle memory capacity limits, but has other 
benefits that persist even when RAM is plentiful:
	- providing a linear, contiguous memory view to processes
	- sandboxing processes from each other

Overlays have very similar benefits to networking. No, they don't fix 
everything, and some of what they've been used to 'fix' really needs 
addressing in the underlying network. But that doesn't mean they're not 
a key part of the solution either.

Joe

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