[ntp:hackers] NTP two-step on-wire protocol

Tim Shoppa shoppa at trailing-edge.com
Wed Jul 25 06:57:24 UTC 2007


"David L. Mills" <mills at udel.edu> wrote:
> todd glassey wrote:
> > What happens when the NIC isn't just a NIC but rather has the stack 
> > and Streams/TLI libraries implemented in HW???
>
> todd,
> Do you have a constructive suggestion?

I'm not sure it's an actual problem that one feature supported on
one OS is not available on a small fraction of NIC hardware (that
might not be supported by that OS anyway).

Dave, I see it as much less a concern than how highly-buffered audio
hardware combined with highly-buffered highly-layered audio drivers
made it a PITA to use the audio refclocks. We ended up with some
highly ifdef'ed code for the platforms where somebody figured out
how to ioctl around a lot of the latency crap in some fraction of
the cases, and that's that.

I honestly don't think that "stack implemented in the NIC" is
going to take over the world. Remember those Unibus Excelan cards, Dave? :-)
It was a bad idea twenty years ago, and it's still a bad idea today.

Tim.


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