Network performance without relying on linux.

[deeprobin]

Hello everyone,

I have just seen the article about flowtables on your blog.

Network performance is important, especially in the case of ubicloud.
Personally, I always use Linux as a rule.

However, I once heard that FreeBSD and BSD systems in general have a very fast network stack that outperforms Linux.

Perhaps it would be relevant to shed some light on this? Especially for applications that are more network-driven.
Or is the aim of Ubicloud to rely exclusively on Linux systems?

See also this thread

[fdr]

It would be interesting...but, we have a lot of reasons to be using Linux, probably most pertinent is the hypervisor, Cloud Hypervisor, which uses Linux KVM and MSHV backends. I suppose it would have to learn bhyve to make a comparable test. So it's pretty unlikely we can make a detour to try that out.

It is somewhat more likely, but with no immediate plan, that we'd consider a user-space stack like VPP. If you were curious how, in general, network stacks could be more or less optimized, VPP, a very fast packet processor, provides good motivation. I suggest media with Dave Barach in it. I don't think anything prevents an OS kernel from implementing things more like VPP really, except (and this is a big "except") path dependency.