RE: [RFC] Direct Sockets Support??

[Jesse Pollard <pollard@tomcat.admin.navo.hpc.mil>]

> 	> Define 'direct sockets' firstly.
> 	Direct Sockets is the ablity by which the application(using sockets)
> can use the hardwares features to provide connection, flow control,
> etc.,instead of the TCP and IP software module. A typical hardware
> technology is Infiniband . In Infiniband, the hardware supports IPv6 . For
> this type of devices there is no need for software TCP/IP. But for
> networking application, which mostly uses sockets, there is a performance
> penalty with using software TCP/IP over this hardware. 
> 
> > I have seen several lines of attack on very high bandwidth devices.
> > Firstly
> > the linux projects a while ago doing usermode message passing directly
> > over
> > network cards for ultra low latency. Secondly there was a VI based project
> > that was mostly driven from userspace.
> > 
> 	The application needs to rewritten to use VIPL, but if we could
> provide a sockets over VI (or Sockets over IB), then the existing
> applications can run with a known environment. 
> 
> 
> > One thing that remains unresolved is the question as to whether the very
> > low
> > cost Linux syscalls and zero copy are enough to achieve this using a
> > conventional socket API and the kernel space, or whether a hybrid direct 
> > access setup is actually needed.
> > 
> 	My point is that if the hardware is capable of doing TCP/IP , we
> should let the sockets layer talk directly to it (direct sockets). Thereby
> the application which uses the sockets will get better performance.

Doesn't this bypass all of the network security controls? Granted - it is
completely reasonable in a dedicated environment, but I would think the
security loss would prevent it from being used for most usage.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.