[HN Gopher] Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
___________________________________________________________________
Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
Author : robbiet480
Score : 657 points
Date : 2023-03-22 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (amturing.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (amturing.acm.org)
| mukundesh wrote:
| I read the ethernet
| paper(https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/360248.360253) in college -
| one of the few instances where the paper did a better job of
| explaining the concept that the textbook.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused
| legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD
| for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions
| imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was
| also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees,
| making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving
| economies of scale. It's the VHS of datacomms.
|
| It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient
| standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been
| increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for
| which it was never intended and where far superior, though more
| expensive solutions already existed.
|
| That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its
| job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award
| comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant
| dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to
| forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Ethernet evolved in backward compatible way for more than 30
| years. If we would design a new standard from scratch to fit
| the same use cases we in theory can learn from the experience
| and improve things but at the same it would be hard to resist a
| temptation to make it future-proof by adding a lot of things
| just in case and this new standard likely will be even more
| wasteful. And having opportunity doesn't mean it will be used.
| I often see new design make mistakes avoided in older designs
| because people have limited time to learn and body of knowledge
| is too large to always successfully learn from the past.
|
| Also hardware is not like software where you can rewrite a site
| using a JS framework of the day every few years. Compatibility
| is really important.
| nine_k wrote:
| What are some superior competing standards, and could they be
| implemented in a royalty-free way?
| Sporktacular wrote:
| The point was more about competing technical choices made by
| designers, rather than the choice of standards made by
| consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably more scalable,
| bandwidth and energy efficient than CSMA/CD and can give
| consistent PL, PD and PDV, so might have even allowed early
| business grade voice. Variable header sizes would have
| allowed efficient use over bandwidth constrained media like
| radio. But the low cost and fast success of Ethernet formed a
| barrier to entry for competing LAN standards, where those
| arguably better technical choices may have found a footing.
|
| They eventually found application in other non-LAN standards,
| so guess royalties weren't an issue.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| TDMA needs time synchronization and thus becomes more
| complex.
|
| Even in telecoms the packet switched connections are
| quickly replacing synchronous time division connections.
| jabl wrote:
| The recent-ish 10base-t1 uses something called PLCA
| instead of CSMA/CD which doesn't require time
| synchronization, and gives each node in a subnet a
| dedicated transmission slot.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| 10Base-T1L is point to point, 10Base-T1S is multidrop,
| but very limited in nodes and how long the branches/stubs
| can be.
|
| We'll see how it actually performs in field. Microchip
| seems to be in the T1S boat and TI+AD in T1L.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| None of those things could be implemented in the 1970 or
| 1980s at reasonable cost so they're not actually solutions
| at all.
|
| Hell even making Ethernet fully switched didn't really
| happen until the 1990s thanks to Moore's law making the
| ASICs cheap enough.
|
| Without mass adoption there's no reason to invest. Look at
| Token Ring, Ethernet's only real competitor at scale: it
| quickly started to lag behind. Ethernet shipped 100Mbps
| several years before Token Ring. The 1Gbps Token Ring
| standard was never put to hardware.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| TDMA is an extension of TDM, which goes back to the 60's.
| Synchronization was already solved. Variable header size
| could be implemented with the same preamble concept
| already used by Ethernet, but used to indicate the end of
| the header. These were not hard problems. The technology
| existed, the affordability would have largely depended on
| adoption, so it's hard to say.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| We'll have to agree to disagree. Obviously TDM was known
| but implementing it for ethernet at a reasonable cost was
| just not an option at the time (in my opinion).
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| If they went extinct they were not superior.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Betamax was superior to VHS, and it went the way of the
| dinosaur. Sometimes better means more expensive, and that's
| not always the popular choice. It wasn't the better
| survivor, but it was the better format. First to market,
| higher res, smaller tape, longer life, still lost. But
| don't take my word for it.
| https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-
| differenc...
| bombcar wrote:
| Superior includes cost, and even things like number of
| suppliers.
| asah wrote:
| the best tech doesn't always win, and in fact the "best"
| tech is typically promoted by people who focus more on the
| tech and less on go-to-market and competitive strategy. And
| thus, the "best" tech often loses to the tech that (for
| example) is better packaged or promoted.
|
| Python is a nice example: inelegant language with many deep
| flaws, but easy syntax and "batteries included" won the
| day.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| That's just not true. Shoddy builders put quality builders
| out of business all the time.
|
| Guess it depends on your faith in markets and your
| definition of superior.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| What would you have used (prior to affordable switches) instead
| of CSMA/CD?
| mhandley wrote:
| There were a number of ring-based technologies such as
| Cambridge Ring that even predate Ethernet: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Ring_(computer_netwo...
|
| The main reason Ethernet won, I think, is that it was really
| easy to deploy incrementally. It was much more plug-and-play
| than anything else at the time.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| My memory is that every ring topology had pretty nasty
| failure characteristics around "a single
| misbehaving/failing client."
|
| Which Ethernet has too, but can generally tolerate a much
| higher level of imperfect reality, while still providing
| degraded service.
|
| Before you could get plentiful high-quality NICs and
| cabling, graceful degradation was a killer feature.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You forgot to put on your ATM cap :)
| williamDafoe wrote:
| You could not be more wrong! Efficiency and overhead are
| measured as a percent of frame size and 128-byte packets (X.25)
| or 48-byte frames (Atm) are abortions. 1500 bytes at the outset
| and the overhead is < 1% and < 0.2% with jumbograms (8kB).
| Every 802.11 standard is a superset of Ethernet and that makes
| DIX Ethernet the most scalable network protocol of all time!
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Do you mean subset? It was first standardized as 802.3.
| Contention under CSMA/CD meant it was not scalable - as in it
| became inefficient as the segment grew. But you're right and
| I stand corrected in sense of the header/frame length ratio.
| I'd edit that first sentence if I still could.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It was a lot less ugly than whatever else passed for networking
| standards at the physical level in those days.
|
| Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them
| all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked,
| besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in
| very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own
| interesting failure modes in practice it was far more
| reliable), and some used tons of power which made them unusable
| for quite a few applications. On top of that it was _way_
| cheaper and carried broad support from different vendors, which
| enabled competition and helped to improve it and keep prices
| low.
| mkovach wrote:
| Oh good heavens. Arcnet! When I first learned about writing
| Linux device drivers, it was trying to get a decent driver
| for some Arcnet cards that the company I worked at as using
| in some client installations. Can't remember exactly why we
| never completed it (well, yea I do. Ethernet worked better, a
| lot better) but since we never "released the product" they
| never let us send in the driver we did write to the kernel
| mailing list. That was in the kernel 1.x days.
|
| Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.
|
| Join the club...
|
| And it all seems like yesterday.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Oh yeah, Cap'n Bob:
|
| "Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but
| what will?" (Infoworld, June 21, 1999)
|
| _... Why do I think Linux won 't kill Windows? Two reasons. The
| Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux
| is 30-year-old technology._
|
| _The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard
| Stallman 's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and
| multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about
| world domination...._
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/19991216220752/http://www.infowo...>
|
| Though in time he moderated his views ... slightly:
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20070622115025/http://www.linux....>
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for
| 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was
| cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a
| few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask:
| How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"?
|
| Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to
| the square of the number of devices of the system.
|
| When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it
| up."
|
| Me: .. what?
|
| Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more.
|
| Me: .. what?
|
| Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was
| great. So I told them buying more made each of them more
| valuable.
|
| It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on
| that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have
| proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it
| started.
|
| He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to
| start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared
| a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of
| transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I
| think I kept a copy of it..
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup
| community" - I mean that seriously.
|
| Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of
| Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended
| Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was
| generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo
| for one of his classes (circa 2012).
|
| It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just
| hanging out and chatting with people.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Absolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015
| to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was
| present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup
| pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern
| look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not
| been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine
| he is still around to be found.
| seehafer wrote:
| Had a very similar experience hanging out with him and his
| equally-brilliant wife Robyn in ATX between 2011-2012. Very
| approachable guy -- impressively so, given his stature in
| the industry -- but could be quick with the "what the hell
| are you talking about?" look.
| dwheeler wrote:
| He may have "made it up" to improve sales, but from a certain
| viewpoint it's correct. If decide to measure the "value" of a
| network based on the number of node connections, then the
| number of connections for n nodes is n(n-1)/2 = 0.5n^2 - 0.5n
| which is O(n^2).
|
| Of course, the _value_ of something is hard to measure.
| Typically you measure value as "benefits - costs", and try to
| convert everything to a currency. E.g., see:
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.as...
| . But there are often many unknowns, as well as intangible
| benefits and costs. That make that process - which _seems_
| rigorous at first - a lot harder to do in reality.
|
| So while he may have "made it up" on the spot, he had a deep
| understanding of networking, and I'm sure he knew that the
| number of connections is proportional to the square of the
| number of nodes. So I suspect his intuition grabbed a quick way
| to estimate value, using what he knew about connection growth.
| Sure, it's nowhere near as rigorous as "benefits - costs", but
| that is hard to really measure, and many decisions simply need
| adequate enough information to make a reasonable decision. In
| which case, he both "made it up" _and_ made a claim that you
| can justify mathematically.
| btilly wrote:
| Not only did he make it up, but it is false! Multiple lines of
| evidence point to a O(n log(n)) law instead.
|
| https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf has the
| details.
| NHQ wrote:
| From the paper:
|
| > In general, connections are not used with the same
| intensity... so assigning equal value to them is not
| justified. This is the basic objection to Metcalfe's Law...
|
| In my architectonic opinion, the perfect network comprises
| all nodes operating equally. Ergo the ideal is indeed
| Metcalfe's law, but architecture and design can be costly,
| which is simple the inefficient use of resources. These being
| very precise machines, anything less than 99.999% is amateur,
| ergo the law obtains.
| btilly wrote:
| We are talking about computer systems that connect a
| network of humans. Humans are notoriously imprecise and
| unreliable machines. Anything more than 0.00001% is
| therefore a miracle.
| passwordoops wrote:
| HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how
| many other laws are built on nothing.
|
| If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep
| enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some
| necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple
| the whole thing
| shuntress wrote:
| _" IF proven incorrect"_ is the important part.
|
| This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was
| originally used as a sales tactic.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| How would you even test such a vague law, let alone
| disproving it?
| btilly wrote:
| The law implies testable consequences, such as what the
| economic incentives should be from interconnecting
| networks. They are good enough that we should expect to
| see more drive to interconnect, and stronger barriers to
| entry for future networks, than history actually shows.
|
| https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf
| offers this and several other lines of evidence that the
| law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling
| law.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing.
|
| variance/standard deviation (also btw, a sum of squares
| concept)
|
| it marks the inflection points on the gaussian curves, but so
| what, the 2nd derivative points to something significant
| about the integral? not really. But even if we accept that it
| does, what does two standard deviations mean? a linear double
| on the x coordinates says what about the a hairy population
| density function? nothing.
|
| or similar to Metcalfe's Law, the very widely used Herfindahl
| Index (also squares!). It's a cross between a hash and a
| compression, it says something about the original numbers,
| but wildly different scenarios can collide.
| syedkarim wrote:
| Do you know of any in particular?
| toyg wrote:
| CS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than
| Newton's...
| magic_hamster wrote:
| It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short
| term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The
| "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated
| circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18
| months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it
| was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but
| it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold
| for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction
| for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of
| silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish)
| years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).
| bombcar wrote:
| Moore's law is almost the opposite of Metcalfe's -
| Metcalfe's encourages you to build out the network as fast
| as possible to get the most value; Moore's implies you
| should wait as long as possible before buying processing
| power to get the most you can.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due
| to additional advancements and technically it hasn't yet
| stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and
| Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to
| have stopped for Intel itself apparently).
|
| Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this
| impacted Koomey's law which talks about performance/watt
| and saw a similar petering out.
|
| Apparently the bound at even a conservative rate puts the
| thermodynamic doubling limit at 2080. After that we'll have
| to really hope smart people have figured out how to make
| reversible computing a thing.
| logi2mus wrote:
| lots of (not only european) public funding made progress
| to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.
| btilly wrote:
| CPU clock speed stopped improving slightly sooner than
| that. Performance continued to improve, but they switched
| from making single threaded code faster to adding more
| cores.
|
| This was a bit of a bummer for programmers working in
| single threaded languages who found that their code
| stopped getting faster for free.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Moore's law isn't even dead. It says that the number of
| transistors per dollar rises at that rate, which is still
| going. Commenters tend to omit the cost component of
| Moore's remark.
| chx wrote:
| Moore's law is still going , or so I thought. It's Dennard
| scaling that stopped around 2006.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-
| microproc...
| swayvil wrote:
| When observation is translated to "law". That is an act of
| judgment on the part of the law-maker, purely. Call it "built
| on nothing" if you like. But as opposed to what?
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is quite telling that when Bob Metcalfe 'makes stuff up' he
| still hits it out of the park.
| stormfather wrote:
| > But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got
| this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly
| supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.
|
| - Bob Metcalfe
| riceart wrote:
| A little confirmation bias on this one. In addition to the
| infamous internet will collapse prediction he was also pretty
| whole hog on the Segway scooter revolutionizing transit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So let me enlighten you a bit: we _did_ collapse the
| internet, and got a testy email from a bunch of backbone
| maintainers that they were going to block our live video
| streams (on port 2047) in four weeks time or so. Which
| resulted in us moving to the other side of the Atlantic to
| relieve the transatlantic cable. So even if it didn 't make
| the news Metcalfe was 100% on the money on that particular
| prediction. The Segway never had a chance as far as I'm
| concerned but the other thing he got just so. But maybe he
| never knew (and I never knew about his bet).
| chasd00 wrote:
| I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best
| advice was usually "just try the 3c509 driver".
| xbar wrote:
| Practically a mantra.
| bombcar wrote:
| It was well known when I started that you got a card that
| would work with that (and later for gigabit it was e1000).
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Similar to "try the HP 4si driver" for printers?
| jabl wrote:
| I remember when I bought my first fast ethernet card, there
| was some Linux HOWTO that discussed various ethernet NIC's,
| and crucially, their Linux drivers in excruciating detail.
| And the takeaway was that if you had a choice, pick either
| 3com 5xx(?) or Intel card. The 3com card was slightly cheaper
| at the local computer shop, so that's what I ended up with
| (595 Vortex, maybe?).
| IYasha wrote:
| Yeah, I had gold-plated 100Mb 3Com cards and they were the
| best. (something-905-series?) With full-duplex, hardware
| offloading, good drivers. I still have one lying somewhere.
| )
| hinkley wrote:
| As a poor college student I scavenged 3c509 cards to build a
| computer network in an apartment I shared with two other
| chronic internet users.
|
| That was right about the time someone has solved a bug with
| certain revisions of the card behaving differently. So
| suddenly the availability jumped considerably.
| [deleted]
| not2b wrote:
| Although he made it up, there's an argument that the value goes
| up more than linearly. But as the network grows, every node
| doesn't necessarily need to talk to every other node except in
| rare circumstances, or they can reach each other through an
| intermediate point. So maybe O(n log n) would be closer.
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall seeing an article a number of years ago that argued
| just that. That the network effect is nlogn. Still enough to
| help explain why large networks grow larger, but it also
| means that overcoming the incumbent is not the insurmountable
| wall it may seem to be. You may only need to work twice as
| hard to catch up, rather than orders of magnitude harder.
| ksajadi wrote:
| Love the story, man!
| [deleted]
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| And yet it's trivially true. Value accrues with connectivity,
| which is number of the edges in a fully connected graph being
| n(n-1)/2, which as n grows larger approximates to n^2. I would
| be surprised he said he "made it up", other than as a joke
| about elementary computer science.
| cafeinux wrote:
| As n grows larger, the number of edges approximates n2/2. I
| may be pedantic but I feel that the difference between
| something and it's half is non-negligible.
| not2b wrote:
| You're assuming complete connectivity; no one builds
| networks of nontrivial size that way.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate
| discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class
| even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph
| has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by
| "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal
| theory into computing.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Metcalfe's law is about network impact or value, not about
| connections.
| ivalm wrote:
| Yeah, but basically it's a statement that value scales
| linearly with the number of pairwise connection.
| fsckboy wrote:
| but it's a loose approximation so it's not good to
| overanalyze it.
|
| The number of pairwise connections grows as the number of
| pairwise connections, and connections ("how many people
| can you talk to") are valuable, so value grows. But
| individual connections to networks grow the pairwise
| connections by N, so that's even better.
|
| broadcast (one to many connections, like giving a speech
| to a crowd) is an efficiency hack, which is good, and
| efficiency hacks grow as the number of connections grow,
| so that's good too...
|
| ... is more how I think about what Metcalfe was talking
| about. Which aspects are x, which are x squared, which
| are log x is interesting, but that's not all bound up in
| his simple statment, despite his "as the square" wording.
|
| and Bob Metcalfe is personally a great guy in all the
| ways people are saying, but it's not soooo unique, that's
| the way a lot of tech types were as the mantle passed
| from the Greatest Generation to the Boomers (and what was
| that one in the middle, "lost" or "invisible" or
| something) I'm not suggesting we've lost that (we may
| have) just saying that's how it was, for instance as an
| undergrad you could walk into any professor's office and
| get serious attention.
| [deleted]
| btilly wrote:
| It counts connections and uses them as an estimate of
| value.
|
| However not all connections are equally valuable. And
| therefore the "law" is incorrect. An estimate in far better
| agreement with the data is O(n log(n)), and you can find
| multiple lines of reasoning arriving at that in
| https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf.
| asciii wrote:
| Was it not specifically "compatibly communicating devices"
| or something and not users like how it was marketed.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I thought it was a "combinatorial explosion?"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion#Commun.
| ..
| fsckboy wrote:
| well, according to Alonzo Church, if this is x squared and
| that is x squared, then this is that.
| madmax108 wrote:
| Congrats Bob!
|
| If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I
| recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie
| Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from
| ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with
| large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book
| features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet
| and ALOHAnet).
|
| Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is
| both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also
| stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!
| wistlo wrote:
| The archetypal "good enough" solution:
|
| Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them.
|
| I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection
| I need to get in my work.
| zokier wrote:
| It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it
| later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma
| anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet.
| Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution
| from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to
| switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical,
| and virtual networks
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Ethernet is also an example of a tech that has an easy
| scaling path: hubs with switched uplink ports made it really
| easy to divide collision domains. In the early days before
| everything was switched you could instantly reduce collision
| losses with a little bit of hardware in the server closet
| with no other changes to the network.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You left out a step: ThinNet coax, without vampire taps!
|
| That's what was at 3Com when I joined in 1985. I even have a
| section in The Big Bucks where I took down the entire company
| for a few seconds by disconnecting the coax. No one noticed.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any
| have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches
| are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other
| 'previously enterprise' features.
| jandrese wrote:
| Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit,
| so they're effectively extinct.
|
| Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty
| hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and
| joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic
| was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100
| hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100
| clients and vice versa. Autodetection was at best a roll of
| the dice so most people wired down their port settings
| instead. Everybody hated them and switches got cheap real
| fast so they didn't last very long. The only thing they
| were good for was network diagnostics.
| EricE wrote:
| > The only thing they were good for was network
| diagnostics.
|
| Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet
| sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart
| enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus
| fairly ubiquitous now.
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, but it _did_ detect transmission in progress (carrier
| sensing) which helped to avoid collisions in the first place.
| hoseja wrote:
| What's the killer feature that differentiates Ethernet from other
| phy protocols?
| roganp wrote:
| Packet collision detection vs. collision avoidance
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Original DIX Ethernet was standardized by my manager, David
| Redell of Xerox. It was the bare minimum to do the job, 6-byte
| station destination, 6-byte source address, 2-byte packet
| length, a 2-byte Ethertype field (the latter 2 were combined
| for networks with hardware framing), and 32-bit CRC. NO arc in
| the hardware. It leveraged the move to byte-based memories and
| small CPUs. It followed the end-to-end principle in system
| design just about optimally - the most minimal MAC design of
| all time. EASY TO BUILD UPON AND ENHANCE.
|
| Ethernet (CSMA/CD) is a protocol that copies human speech
| patterns. After someone stops speaking people hear the quiet
| (carrier sense multiple access / CSMA) and wait a very short
| and randomized amount of time and begin to speak. If two
| speakers collide they hear the collision and shut up (CD -
| collision detection). They both pick a randomized amount of
| time to pause before trying again. On the second third etc.
| collision people wait longer and longer before retrying.
|
| The thing about original ethernet (1981) is that it wastes 2/3
| of the channel because a highly loaded channel has too many
| collisions and too many back offs. But deployment and wiring
| were expensive so running a single wire throughout a building
| was the cheapest possible way to start (enhanced by thinwire
| Ethernet and twisted pair to have a less bulky cable a few
| years later). The frame design was PERFECT and within ~10 years
| people were using ethernet frames to build switched networks
| and today only radio networks are CSMA/CD = Ethernet.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| I was in Xerox SDD in the early 80's I have lots of memories
| dealing with the large coax taps which we in the ceiling.
|
| I also remember setting up a Star demo at the NCC and someone
| forget coax cable terminators (or was short one terminator?)
| which was causing reflectance issues with the signal which
| was solved by cutting the cable to a precise length to get
| the demo working.
| irq-1 wrote:
| Maybe you know, why isn't the CRC at the end? Then you could
| stream the packet instead of needing to construct it and then
| go back to the header to write the CRC.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| The fact that it allowed for all kinds of topologies, and that
| it served as a bus (shared medium, hence the name 'Ether')
| rather than a point-to-point link is what I think made the
| biggest difference.
|
| Of course now that we all use switched links they are point-to-
| point again but an ethernet 'hub' gave you the same effect as a
| bus with all devices seeing all of the traffic. This made
| efficient broadcast protocols possible and also allowed for a
| historical - but interesting - trick: the screw-on taps that
| you could place on a single coaxial cable running down a
| department giving instant access without pulling another cable.
| Zero network configuration required, just get the tap in place
| and assign a new address. DHCP later took care of that need as
| well.
|
| This was fraught with problems, for instance a single
| transceiver going haywire could make a whole segment unusable
| and good luck finding the culprit. But compared to the
| competition it absolutely rocked.
| em-bee wrote:
| for years i was carrying around an ethernet splitter that
| would allow me to connect two devices into one ethernet port.
| i last used it some 10 years ago in a place without wifi
| asimpletune wrote:
| Yeah, it's a very cool trick that surprises a lot of people
| when they learn that only half the wires are used.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not for gigabit ethernet and good luck picking up the
| pieces if you find yourself splitting a power-over-
| ethernet setup :)
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of the "REAL" power over ethernet:
| http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hehe, I remember that page :) Thanks!
|
| Some of the captions are quite funny.
| em-bee wrote:
| using a splitter is usually a temporary solution, and i
| am unlikely to be sharing a port with a PoE device. nor
| do i care about gigabit speed when the only reason to use
| a splitter is to make up for missing wifi.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| To build on your comment, although it's been years since I
| studied Ethernet in depth...
|
| - (On the bus thread) Ethernet started from an assumption of
| bad behavior (out of spec cabling, misbehaving clients, etc.)
| and tighten requirements just enough to construct a useful
| network. _Much_ better balance between de facto ruggedness vs
| performance than its peers.
|
| - From the beginning, Ethernet reasoned that it was cheaper
| to put logic in purpose-built networking hardware than
| endpoints (i.e. PC network adapters). This was a better
| scaling tradeoff. 1x $$$ network device + 100x $ client
| adapter vs 1x $$ networking device + 100x $$ client adapter.
|
| - Because of the above, you started to get _really_ cost- and
| data-efficient networks when the cost of Ethernet switches
| plummeted. (Remember, in early Ethernet days, networks were
| hub /broadcast-only!)
| jacquesm wrote:
| I remember paying about $1000 per port for 100 megabit
| switches.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Ha! But they delivered that much value (or more), so the
| market supported the price until supply flooded.
|
| We could do worse for a transformative technology ranking
| metric than "How overpriced was this when first
| released?" (significant look at Nvidia cards)
| jacquesm wrote:
| I had a bunch of workloads that quite literally got cut
| down to about 15% or so of the original runtime (a
| cluster compressing a whole archive of CDs for a large
| broadcaster) so I happily paid up. But still... $1000 /
| port!!
|
| And here I have sitting next to me a 48 port gigabit
| switch that cost 15% of what that 100 megabit switch cost
| in 1996 or so. Iirc it was one of the first D-link
| products I bought, it definitely wasn't great (it ran
| pretty hot) but it worked quite well enough. Amazing
| progress.
| bombcar wrote:
| And you can get switches for less than $25 per 10gb port
| now.
|
| Of course the jump from 10mb hub to 100mb switch was much
| larger than any of the later jumps, just because of the
| reduced noise.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Ethernet switches are actually pretty complex things,
| when you think about it. They have to learn what MAC
| addresses are behind each port, and build a complex
| forwarding table and do table lookups in real time. The
| larger the switch, the more complex it is. Its hard to
| make it scale.
|
| Around the same era, Myrinet switches with higher
| bandwidth (1.2Gb/s if I remember correctly) and higher
| density at a fraction of the port cost of slower ethernet
| switches. This was possible because the Myrinet switches
| were dumb.. The Myrinet network elected a "mapper" that
| distributed routes to all NICs. The NICs then pre-pended
| routing flits to the front of each packet. So to forward
| a packet to its destination, all a Myrinet switch had to
| do was strip off and then read the first flit, see that
| it said "exit this hop on port 7", and then forward it on
| to the next switch. Higher densities were achieved with
| multiple chips inside the cabinet.
|
| In the mid 2000s we even built one of what was, at the
| time, one of the worlds largest ethernet switches using
| (newer, faster Myrinet) internally, and encapsulating the
| ethernet traffic inside Myrinet. That product died due to
| pressure from folks that were our partners, but felt
| threatened by our incredibly inexpensive high density
| switches.
|
| https://www.networkworld.com/article/2323306/myricom-
| rolls-o...
|
| EDIT: fixed routing flit description, added link to PR
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very interesting!
| jabl wrote:
| Sounds similar to Infiniband where each subnet has a
| subnet manager which calculates routing tables for the
| entire subnet, and assigns 16-bit local identifiers (LID)
| so you stations don't need to use the full 16 byte
| GUID's.
|
| Also Infiniband packets are power of two sized, making
| fast switching easier.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Neat! (Re: you and parent)
|
| At their core, most hardware evolutions seem like
| optimizing compute:memory:storage:functionality vs the
| (changing) current state of the art/economy.
|
| When Ethernet was first released, compute was expensive.
| Made sense to centralize compute (in routers) and make
| everything else dumb-tolerant.
|
| Now, compute is cheap and plentiful at network-
| calculating scales and throughout expectations are very
| high, so it makes sense to burn compute (including in
| clients) to simplify routing hardware.
| gooroo wrote:
| And it was sniffing heaven. Only paralleled by the brief
| period of nobody using any serious encryption on their wifi.
| xbar wrote:
| Where "brief" was about 10 years, which at the time was
| about 25% of all time that networks were common.
| yuuho wrote:
| At the time, maybe. Eventually it will be remembered as a
| short glitch in tech history.
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Yup! A whole other real-time industrial protocol called
| EtherCAT has been built on top of the same hardware.
| northlondoner wrote:
| Well deserved. Impact is immense. Of course, Xerox PARC alumni.
| cc101 wrote:
| He is also the arrogant ignorant engineer who bought and ruined
| Infoworld.
| pedrovhb wrote:
| Ah, the best and most readily available source of makeshift
| jumper wires. Truly an amazing contribution even in ways it
| wasn't quite designed to be :)
| lambda_dn wrote:
| Wifi/5G guys next? Much more important invention in my opinion
| jacquesm wrote:
| Give it 30 years. And the one wouldn't be there without the
| other.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| WiFi would definitely be here now with or without Ethernet.
| throw0101b wrote:
| Wireless (packet/frame) networks were around before
| Ethernet:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
| xbar wrote:
| From 1990, the 802.11 standards body was gyrating on radio-
| based 802.11 ideas.
|
| That body would not even have existed without Ethernet.
| throw0101b wrote:
| And Ethernet may not have existed without work of the
| ALOHAnet:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
|
| Ideas feed ideas, giants/shoulders, etc.
| rasz wrote:
| Wifi would have to go to Steve Jobs :-) Lucent was sitting on
| 802.11 (WaveLAN) for ten years selling super expensive products
| targeting niche markets and it took Apple to move things
| forward. More in "Oral History of Arthur "Art" Astrin", wifi
| pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ
| dale_glass wrote:
| Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and
| have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain.
|
| Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit
| ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.
| amelius wrote:
| If only USB was half as reliable as Ethernet ...
|
| The anti-Turing award goes to the inventors of USB.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite
| moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design
| (especially handling packet collisions with randomized
| retransmissions).
|
| Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple
| and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think in part what you are witnessing there is the power of a
| single well informed individual over a committee, which is how
| the competition was doing it.
| ArtRichards wrote:
| I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup
| course, it was cool and hip and new, and they'd flown in mentors
| from SV and other places, so I figured, why not?
|
| So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While
| waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather
| distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are
| you here for the Startup Course interviews?
|
| Yeah...
|
| Well, why are you here in the lobby?
|
| Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody
| called me.
|
| He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And
| you're just going to sit here and wait?
|
| I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I
| didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?'
|
| "Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger.
| Damn, he was right.
|
| So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy
| organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and
| sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in...
|
| Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me,
| with a big grin.
|
| Hi?
|
| Hi.
|
| You're a part of this?
|
| Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe.
|
| Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story?
|
| Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet.
|
| Oh... damn.. cool..
|
| ...And my life has never been the same since!
|
| If you read this, thanks Bob.
| japanuspus wrote:
| Quanta magazine article on subj.:
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/bob-metcalfe-ethernet-pioneer...
|
| (This link is also on front page right now, but not getting any
| comments).
| leephillips wrote:
| I hear the Matcalfe has been spending some time recently at the
| MIT Julia lab working on climate issues.
| lispython wrote:
| A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his
| Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the
| dispatch of this message).
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I there must be another internet law which states that the best
| twitter accounts have around this number
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's more a personal account that's 1 year old which opens with
| a tweet on cancel culture followed by his political leanings,
| cryptocurrency posts, and an overwhelming amount of basketball
| stats. It does have the occasional post about his involvement
| in geothermal energy though but beyond that following the
| account isn't going to get you any content he's known and
| respected for.
| OJFord wrote:
| If he was tweeting anecdotes, or still working (seems he might
| be?) and tweeting about it it'd probably be a lot more - but
| it's mostly US basketball (and other sports/personal stuff) by
| the looks of it, so however veritable a hero it's just not
| interesting to the same audience (or at least, for the same
| reason, of course some of us will be basketball fans) - and
| probably if you're big into 'basketball Twitter' he's
| ~'nobody'.
| theharrychen wrote:
| How did he not get this earlier?
| williamDafoe wrote:
| ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of
| theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe
| was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not
| fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided
| by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a
| critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him.
|
| For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100
| cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers
| (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science.
|
| So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he
| didn't pioneer all alone.
| tobylane wrote:
| There's a lot of inventions to award people for. Some of the
| other recipients look overdue by the time it came to them.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
| OJFord wrote:
| It coming to Metcalfe for Ethernet 7 years after to Berners-
| Lee for the WWW is amusing though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, the one would not have existed without the other.
| js8 wrote:
| Perhaps they are giving it by OSI layers.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's very funny :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. He really should have.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| I would recommend to watch a talk by Bob Metcalfe given in 1978:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7r3vYAjGY for so impactful
| technology this video has surprisingly few views on youtube.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well-deserved!
| xp84 wrote:
| > "Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name,
| Wireless Ethernet, for old times' sake."
|
| Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my
| favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle
| and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi
| password here, Bob?"
|
| Bob: "What's the what now?"
|
| You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?"
|
| Bob: "Oh, it's HotelGuest2023"
| bundie wrote:
| Okay that's funny
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other
| networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders
| above anything else available at the time.
|
| One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power
| efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other
| network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network
| cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow.
| Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'.
|
| As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it
| suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the
| competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm
| writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired
| networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and
| throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier
| to me than convenience.
|
| So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit
| late.
|
| Anybody remember Don Becker?
| eointierney wrote:
| Never met Don Becker but as it was the Beowulf project that got
| me interested in GNU/Linux he is synonymous with ethernet
| drivers
| rejectfinite wrote:
| >They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant
| rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than
| convenience.
|
| They ARE more reliable.
|
| I much rather use ethernet than wifi on desktops and laptop.
|
| Now with video meetings, high quality webcams, mics and gaming,
| latency and bandwith is king.
|
| WiFi is usually FAST but it is not as STABLE.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I had no idea that Token Ring was inefficient with power, but
| it certainly had a bunch of other problems. Biggest (at least
| on PCs) was its inability to recover from a cable being
| unplugged without resetting a bunch of the system, and the
| type-1 token ring cables win the award for being the most
| needlessly bulky,[1] even if the connectors had a plug-into-
| each-other party trick.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...
| oaiey wrote:
| WiFi is not the competition ;) It is the brother in arms ;)
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as
| everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade
| hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified
| ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid
| margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is
| like over 100...
| RF_Savage wrote:
| 2.5Gb is downshifted 10Gb with the same line coding, just
| with 1/4 the symbol rate. This means that it inherits all the
| complexities of 10GbE, while tolerating cheaper connectors
| and cables. 10GbE uses DSQ128 PAM-16 at 800Msym/s. 2.5G just
| does quarter-rate at 200Msym/s.
|
| 1000BaseT uses trellis coded PAM-5, a significantly less
| complex modulation.
|
| When one factors in the complexity of the line code and all
| equalisation and other processing in the analog frontend
| things get expensive. Copper 10Gb interfaces run very hot for
| a reason. It takes quite a bit of signal processing and
| tricks to push 10Gb over copper, at least for any significant
| distances.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _tolerating cheaper connectors and cables
|
| I always find the graphic below handy for telling which Cat
| cable can handle which Gig speed:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#
| Var..._
| toast0 wrote:
| It's not really about can handle, but more is specified
| to handle at maximum length in a dense conduit.
|
| At shorter lengths, and in single runs, it's always worth
| trying something beyond what the wiring jacket says. I've
| run gigE over a run with a small section of cat3 coupled
| to a longer cat5e run (repurposed 4-pair phone wire), and
| just recently setup a 10G segment on a medium length of
| cat5e. The only thing is while I think 2.5G/5G devices do
| test for wiring quality, the decimal speeds don't, auto-
| negotiation happens on the 1Mbps link pulses, unmanaged
| devices can easily negotiate to speeds that won't work,
| if your wiring is less than spec, you need to be able to
| influence negotiation on at least one side, in case it
| doesn't work out.
| fulafel wrote:
| It's a big loss that wired networking speeds have plateaued
| but I feel it's more about apps and people adapting to slow
| and choppy wireless networks that penalise apps leveraging
| quality connectivity, and stand as bottlenecks in home
| networks (eg you don't need 10G broadband the wifi will cap
| everything to slow speeds anyway). And mobile devices that
| had much smaller screens and memories than computers for a
| decade+ stalling the demand driven by moore's law.
| dale_glass wrote:
| You can have 10G with eg, Mikrotik at a reasonable price.
|
| One problem with it is that the copper tech is just power
| hungry. It may actually make sense to go with fiber,
| especially if you might want even more later (100G actually
| can be had at non-insane prices!)
|
| Another problem is that it's CPU intensive. It's actually not
| that hard to run into situations where quite modern hardware
| can't actually handle the load of dealing with 10G at full
| speed especially if you want routing, a firewall, or
| bridging.
|
| It turns out Linux bridge interfaces disable a good amount of
| the acceleration the hardware can provide and can enormously
| degrade performance, which makes virtualization with good
| performance a lot trickier.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Another problem is that it 's CPU intensive._
|
| Are there 10GigE cards that do _not_ do things like IP /TCP
| offloading at this point?
|
| Offloading dates back to (at least) 2005:
|
| * https://www.chelsio.com/independent-research-
| shows-10g-ether...
|
| * https://www.networkworld.com/article/2312690/tcp-offload-
| lif...
| dale_glass wrote:
| You can go fast if you don't do anything fancy with the
| interface.
|
| If you say, want bridged networking for your VMs and add
| your 10G interface to virbr0, poof, a good chunk of your
| acceleration vanishes right there.
|
| Routing and firewalling also cost you a lot.
|
| There are ways to deal with this with eg, virtual
| functions, but the point is that even on modern hardware,
| 10G can be no longer a foolproof thing to have working at
| full capacity. You may need to actually do a fair amount
| of tweaking to have things perform well.
| jandrese wrote:
| The other issue is that unless your computer is acting as
| a router or a bridge, you need to do something with that
| 10GB data stream. SSDs have only recently gotten fast
| enough to just barely support reading or writing that
| fast. But even if you do find one that supports writes
| that fast a 10GbeE card could fill an expensive 4TB drive
| in less than an hour. Good luck decoding JPEGs and
| blitting them out to a web browser window that fast.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >10GB data stream. SSDs have only recently gotten fast
| enough to just barely support reading or writing that
| fast.
|
| 10gbps (gigabits per second) is not 10GB/s (gigabytes per
| second).
|
| Specifically, 10gbps is approximately 1.25GB/s or
| 1250MB/s.
| jandrese wrote:
| Consumer SSDs used to max out at about 550MB/s, some
| still do. You need a larger and more modern drive to do
| 1.25GB/s sustained write. Even then buffering can get
| you.
| iptrans wrote:
| TCP/IP offload isn't the issue.
|
| The core problem is that the Linux kernel uses interrupts
| for handling packets. This limits Linux networking
| performance in terms of packets per second. The limit is
| about a million packets per second per core.
|
| For reference 10GE is about 16 million packets per second
| at line rate using small packets.
|
| This is why you have to use kernel bypass software in
| user space to get linerate performance above 10G in
| Linux.
|
| Popular software for this use case utilize DPDK, XDP or
| VPP.
| toast0 wrote:
| You don't need an interrupt per packet, at least not with
| sensible NICs and OSes. Something like 10k interrupts per
| second is good enough, pick up a bunch of packets on each
| interrupt; you do lose out slightly on latency, but gain
| a lot of throughput. Look up 'interrupt moderation', it's
| not new, and most cards should support it.
|
| Professionlly, I ran dual xeon 2690v1 or v2 to 9Gbps for
| https download on FreeBSD; http hit 10G (only had one 10G
| to the internet on those machines), but crypto took too
| much CPU. Dual Xeon 2690v4 ran to 20Gbps, no problem (2x
| 14 core broadwell, much better AES acceleration, faster
| ram, more cores, etc, had dual 10G to the internet).
|
| Personally, I've just setup 10G between my two home
| servers, and can only manage about 5-8Gbps with iperf3,
| but that's with a pentium g2020 on one end (dual core Ivy
| Bridge, 10 years old at this point), and the network
| cards are configured for bridging, which means no tcp
| offloading.
|
| Edit: also, check out what Netflix has been doing with
| 800Gbps, although sendfile and TLS in the kernel cuts out
| a lot of userspace, kind of equal but opposite of cutting
| out kernelspace, http://nabstreamingsummit.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/05/202...
| iptrans wrote:
| Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as
| can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel.
|
| Intel would also not have gone through the effort to
| develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate
| performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
|
| Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point
| when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is
| trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger
| packets.
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm quoting bulk transfer, with 1500 MTU. I could run
| jumbo packets for my internal network test and probably
| get better numbers, but jumbo packets are hard. When I
| was quoting https download on public internet, that
| pretty much means MTU 1500 as well, but was definitely
| the case.
|
| If you're sending smaller packets, sure, that's harder. I
| guess that's a big deal if you're a DNS server, or voip
| (audio only); but if you're doing any sort of bulk
| transfer, you're getting large enough packets.
|
| > Intel would also not have gone through the effort to
| develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate
| performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.
|
| DPDK has uses, sure. But you don't need it for 10G on
| decent hardware, which includes 7 year old server chips,
| if you're just doing bulk transfer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I can't make heads or tails of your comment. What is scammy
| about Ethernet and what 'stupid margins' does Ethernet have?
| It's a networking standard, not a company.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| 2.5G or even 10G is not that much more expensive and
| companies making consumer electronics sell it as a
| considerable premium for what is essentially the same cost
| difference as making a 8gb vs 16 gb flash drive. Of course,
| regular internet users don't need more than 2.5G (and
| couldn't use it in most of the world due to ISP monopolies)
| so anything faster than gigabit is a target for
| segmentation.
| gooroo wrote:
| The market at work. There is just no real demand for
| anything beyond 1G.
|
| The HN crowd is not representative of what would be
| needed to drive the price tags down on 2.5G stuff.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you have a gigabit internet connection, then most of
| the value of 10G comes from data sharing within the
| intranet, which just never caught on outside of
| hobbyists. And a 1G switch can still handle a lot of
| that, You don't even need 10G for LAN parties, and
| whether backups can go faster depends on the storage
| speed and whether you actually care. Background backups
| hide a lot of sins.
|
| I'm hoping a swing back to on-prem servers will justify
| higher throughput, but that still may not be the case.
| You need something big to get people to upgrade aging
| infrastructure. What would be enough to get people to pay
| for new cable runs? 20Gb? 40?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Rant aside, I think there is an argument to be made that
| 2.5gbps switches "should" be cheaper now that 2.5gbps
| NICs have become fairly commonplace in the mainstream
| market.
|
| Case in point, I have a few recent-purchase machines with
| 2.5gbps networking but no 2.5gbps switch to connect them
| to because I personally can't justify their cost yet.
|
| I suppose I could bond two 1gbps ports together, or
| something, but I like to think I have other yaks to shave
| right now.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can get some basic switches that do 2.5gb but it's
| like $100, a bit more for a brand you might recognize.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Multi-Gigabit-Unmanaged-
| Entert...
|
| Personally I went with Mikrotik's 10gb switch but that
| needed SPF port thingies (which was fine for me, as I was
| connecting one old enterprise switch via fiber, direct
| copperering two servers, and using cabled cat7 or
| whatever for the Mac).
|
| 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free"
| - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally
| "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.
|
| I think 2.5g is going to make it in the marketplace,
| because 2.5g switches are finally starting to come down
| in price, and 10g switches are roughly twice the price,
| and that might be for sfp+, so you'll likely need
| transceivers, unless you're close enough for DAC. (NIC
| prices are also pretty good now, as siblings noted. But
| if you go with used 10G, you can get good prices there
| too, I've got 4 dual 10G cards and paid between $25 and
| $35 shipped for each)
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Yeah, it's that cost that is the problem. If I'm paying
| over a hundred bucks for a switch I might as well go
| higher and consider 10gbps options.
|
| 2.5gbps hardware need to come down to at least the $30 to
| $40 dollar range if they want to make any sense.
| Otherwise, they'll stay as niche hardware specifically
| for diehard enthusiasts or specific professionals only.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| The NICs can be had for $20 (pretty sure I saw a $11 one
| the other day but can't find it right now on mobile).
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The NICs are reasonable now, yes. The issue is the thing
| on the other side of the cable; 2.5gbps switches and
| routers need to come down in price.
| jandrese wrote:
| The problem with 2.5G is that it's not enough of an
| upgrade over 1G to warrant buying all new switches and
| NICs to get it. For that matter few home users push
| around enough data for 10G to be a big win.
|
| IMHO this is why Ethernet has stalled out at 1G. People
| still don't have large enough data needs to make it
| worthwhile. See also: the average storage capacity of new
| personal computers. It has been stuck around 1TB for
| ages. Hell, it went down for several years during the SSD
| transition.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 2.5gbps is literally 2.5x times the speed of gigabit
| ethernet, so that's going to be very noticable even for
| most home users if they do any amount of LAN file
| sharing.
|
| It's really just the cost that's the problem, because
| paying 4x to 5x or even 6x times the cost of gigabit
| hardware for a 2.5x times performance boost doesn't make
| a lot of sense.
|
| If 2.5gbps peripheral hardware costs would come down I
| will happily bet they will take off.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But that has nothing to do with Ethernet as such, which
| isn't a 'company making consumer electronics'.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| You are may actually be right, sorry, my rant may have been
| misguided. "networking standard" doesnt make it free of
| royalties though, dont/didn't companies pay to use the Wifi
| protocol?
| jacquesm wrote:
| What does that have to do with Ethernet?
|
| See:
|
| https://www.iol.unh.edu/sites/default/files/knowledgebase
| /et...
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
| wongarsu wrote:
| People buy ethernet for reliable connection and reliable
| latency (no package drops), and to get 1Gbps. Few consumers
| have need for more, since internet speeds also rarely exceed
| 1Gbps.
|
| Sure, anyone with a NAS might like more, but that's a tiny
| market. And tiny markets lack economy of scale, causing
| prices to be high.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I still have a soft spot in my heart for ARCNet. In the 80s it
| was cheaper than ethernet, but more reliable than token ring.
| And for the few places that prioritized determinism over
| throughput, it was indispensable.
|
| But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet
| retreated to shop-floor niche applications.
|
| Alas.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I get the impression that 10BASE-T killed ARCNet, and it was
| the "T" rather than the "10" that did so. Running cheap CAT-5
| to a set of interconnected hubs was just so much easier and
| more reliable than t-connectors, terminators &c.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| ARCNet is mentioned heavily in _The Big Bucks_. I have to
| admit that I knew very little about it before doing research
| for the book.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find
| out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili
| valley.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the
| architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked
| to Bob back in the day.
|
| Gordon's _still_ bitter about it, and will gladly tell
| you why Ethernet is inferior.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Well.. I still want to read the book. I'm a sucker for a
| well crafted story about old hardware from the days when
| technology gods walked the earth.
|
| I'm sure Ethernet's market domination is because the spec
| wasn't owned by a single company, and nothing to do with
| it's technical merits. After IBM's SNA, people seemed
| paranoid of a networking spec being owned by a single
| company. Do you know if Datapoint thought about that and
| whether they tried to build their own equivalent of the
| DIX consortium?
|
| I also think about SpaceWire / IEEE-1355 / Wormhole
| Routing and what might have been had we adopted systems
| where compute power could be easily upgraded.
|
| Oh! The good old days when everything was possible!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| on DataPoint: my hero (sort of) Matt Feingold spends a
| summer internship at DataPoint. As far as he (and I)
| could tell, people still thought in terms of "account
| control" back then.
|
| There's actually a book on DataPoint (and almost every
| other company from way back when). I read them so you
| don't have to :)
| jandrese wrote:
| Ethernet is one of those case studies in "worse is
| better".
|
| I remember the old saying that "Ethernet doesn't work in
| theory, but it does in practice". Mostly referring to the
| CSMA/CD scheme used before switches took over.
|
| The competitive advantage of being built out of cheap
| commodity hardware and cabling is hard to overstate.
| Nobody likes dealing with vendors, their salespeople, and
| especially support contracts. Especially since that is
| always more expensive and often solves problems you don't
| have, like minimum latency guarantees, at the cost of
| throughput and complexity.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There were a lot of LAN schemes back then. Mostly
| forgotten now.
|
| Many press commentators opined that of course "broadband"
| would be much better than "baseband" since it could carry
| voice and video, not just bits.
| EricE wrote:
| There were a lot of LAN schemes - and slightly
| incompatible ethernet implementations. I remember when
| the Interop tradeshow in Vegas required vendors to either
| attach and integrate with the show network or they would
| get kicked off the floor. Good times!
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Agreed. Can't overstate the cost effectiveness. In the
| late 80s or early 90s you could put hundreds of dumb
| terminals on one network with just hubs for signal
| integrity. Plenty of collisions but it all worked itself
| out somehow if the throughput was light, such as text
| applications, text email, and a small amount of printing
| or sharing. This meant every university could have some
| kind of network scheme, making it a universal for the
| next gen.
| agomez314 wrote:
| How is he only getting this award now?
| williamDafoe wrote:
| ACM Turing award committee has its head up it's ass? Seriously
| 25% of winners have NO impact on the field ...
|
| Metcalfe was controversial because Alohanet from university of
| Hawaii pioneered the idea and Metcalfe was seen as writing a
| nice proof in CACM of the 1/e capacity breakdown theorem and
| popularizing an already extant technology. He did not build it
| alone Chuck Thacker probably built most of it but didn't have a
| PhD! Oh the horror!
|
| He should not have gotten it now - either give it sooner or not
| at all - and he should not be the only one getting it!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com.
|
| In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he
| graciously allowed me to use as something he _would_ have said
| (they 're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person
| appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third
| person.
|
| In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the
| lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and
| SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the
| _second_ lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron
| Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the
| Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a
| competition there actually _was_ a lightning strike, and 3Com 's
| survived it while the competitor's didn't.
| stringfood wrote:
| [dead]
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one
| network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet
| him.
|
| Well deserved.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| In this Infoworld column back in 1995 Bob predicted Internet
| would collapse in 1996 due to security breaches, capacity
| overloads, and demand for video online. He also promised to eat
| the article if this did not happen. And kept his promise.
|
| https://1995blog.com/2015/12/03/prediction-of-the-year-1995-...
| throw0101b wrote:
| Somewhat related:
|
| The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to
| have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still
| have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math
| on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur.
|
| While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades,
| addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition
| will ever been needed and how would that work.
|
| In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though
| for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes,
| but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming
| production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4
| billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?
| williamDafoe wrote:
| It was Xerox & Yogen Dalal's choice, not Bob's choice! Xerox
| blew it with 8-bit station addresses in PuP (PARC Universal
| Protocol) and wanted to give each station a UID to break ties
| in database transactions, hence the 48-bits. XNS actually had
| 3-byte station and 3-byte network size to fit in 6-byte MAC
| addresses! Metcalfe is not a software engineer and wouldn't
| have these insights ...
| zamadatix wrote:
| Some quick napkin math on the current MAC vendors database: 46
| bits of a MAC address are reserved for universally administered
| unicast (i.e. a globally unique MAC assigned to identify a
| device). So far we have assigned ~570 billion addresses via
| 24/28/36 bit range assignments for the same purpose which
| represents a little under 1% of the space. So nothing urgent,
| though if we stuck with Ethernet as much as we use it today
| then in <100 years I wouldn't be surprised if we were "out".
|
| At the same time there are also 46 bits of locally administered
| unicast addresses and, unlike IP, Ethernet addresses only care
| about the local network (and this isn't a "because we've co-
| opted them to to save space just like NAT broke IP protocols"
| rather the design intent of Ethernet). Even if you had 10
| billion LANs with 100 devices each and they all used this
| random non-unique assignment there would only be a ~50% chance
| there one or more devices would have a collision.
|
| The only real advantage I've ever been able to find of
| programming in unique MAC addresses vs random MAC addresses you
| can look up what company the MAC was assigned to. It may seem
| like there is a risk random assignment can be done poorly (e.g.
| not very randomly) but honestly the same risk exist with
| assigned ranges as seen by network vendors cheaping out and re-
| using their MAC blocks (which is significantly more likely to
| conflict than if they just used random locally administered
| addresses in the first place).
| toast0 wrote:
| We're unlikely to ever actually run out. Ethernet addresses are
| _expected_ to be universally unique, but they 're only
| _required_ to be unique within a collision domain. If someone
| started reusing addresses from 3c503s, chances are high nobody
| would notice. If we did run out, devices would need to start
| generating randomized addresses, and maybe probe for
| collisions, which isn 't unworkable; the number of nodes in a
| collision domain tends to be low, and the space is large, you
| might only barely need to to probe for collisions at all if you
| have a good random source.
| cduzz wrote:
| This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020
| and I thought for a second "wait is this his second? What? You
| mean he hadn't been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead
| of him and for what?"
| drewg123 wrote:
| Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to
| colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and
| kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting
| Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make
| ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of
| annoying alignment issues
| gooroo wrote:
| Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than
| that Hitler guy. /s
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| > *joked* to colleagues
| drewg123 wrote:
| Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of
| those more important things when they get access to a time
| machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to
| take care of my pet peeve :)
| toast0 wrote:
| While you're back there, convince people to do IP
| truncation rather than fragmentation. Truncation would
| probably be a lot more useful at lower cost than
| fragmentation, and maybe path MTU problems wouldn't still
| be an issue. *grumble*grumble*
| jonstewart wrote:
| I've got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements
| ends with "Don't let the bastards get you down."
| eimrine wrote:
| Is this supposed to be an Eastern Egg? I have found the book to
| look for the context of the statement but I have not found
| anything interesting after the acknowledgements.
| jonstewart wrote:
| It's just a common saying, especially after WWII.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum
| williamDafoe wrote:
| This just shows what a huge joke the Turing Award process is! He
| should have gotten this award by 2000 or never at all! But the
| committee was too busy giving out awards for writing sexy
| sounding papers about stoplight verification and zero knowledge
| proofs to honor someone who disrupteded the whole field!
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