In two posts on BSD News pointing at e-mails from Robert Watson, a FreeBSD Core Team Developer, presenting both recent accomplishments relating to IPX/SPX and the general status of SMPng and the network stack are discussed. He describes how some of the last sections of the network stack are now being swept up permitting them to run with the MPSAFE network subsystem, as well as the on-going optimization work to clean up some of the added costs of parts of the model. It makes for quite an interesting read, and shows how several years of intense development by a focused team of developers have being paying off with dramatic increases in SMP performance and fairly low (and decreasing) cost in the UP case. He also points at upcoming changes that will further improve performance, including Giant being removed from the UFS file system in the near future. You can read more about Robert Watson’s network stack work on his personal netperf page, or the recently created nFreeBSD project netperf page. These pages discuss both the original locking work, and new optimization work. You can also read about Project Dingo which builds on the netperf work to bring many new networking features to FreeBSD.
Robert Watson announces IPX/SPX now MPSAFE on FreeBSD 5.x
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Although I’m not surprised that the news itself didn’t create that much of an excitement (who uses ipx/spx nowdays?), the links are interesting. Also, a lot more exciting things are happening in FreeBSD right now.
It looks like some perfomance tuning will be trailing down from CURRENT in the very near future:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2005-January…
The USB mailing list seems quite busy, so I expect improvements in ehci (currently it’s still quite buggy on -STABLE). Support for more tv-cards (ATIallinwonder). And so on…
I submitted this over a week ago… I guess the people scanning the articles need a little help…
who uses ipx/spx nowdays
Older Novell networks,as of version 5.x there’s a tcp/ip stack.
Robert Watson announces IPX/SPX now MPSAFE on FreeBSD 5.x
It should be change to 6.x. Robert Watson said, ‘I’ve set of an MFC after of 2-4 weeks for various elements of the above changes.’ It means it will be in FreeBSD 5.x about 2-4 weeks.
IPX/SPX is nice to use on a LAN, as you don’t have to worry about leaking info to the outside world (IPX/SPX is non-routable and won’t leave your LAN without putting a lot of effort into it). It’s also fairly fast when compared to TCP/IP for LAN traffic, and is much nicer to use for LAN gaming. Too bad not a lot (if any) games comes with IPX/SPX support anymore.
Up until last year, I used to use IPX/SPX on all the home networks I admin’d (mine, mom’s, aunt’s, cousin’s), and used a gateway to allow Internet access. Much more secure than have TCP/IP on every device on the LAN.
IPX/SPX support in Windows has been dwindling, and Unix support is too, making it almost not worth the effort.