Re: XTP: A better TCP than TCP

[Matthew Wilcox <Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com>]

On Wed, Jun 02, 1999 at 09:38:59AM +0100, Philip Blundell wrote:
> >I was just reviewing http://www.mentat.com/xtp/xtp.html and
> >http://www.ca.sandia.gov/xtp/. XTP looks like a very interesting protocol. 
> 
> I did some work with XTP a few years back.  It's interesting but it's a very 
> heavyweight protocol compared to TCP.  It tries to be all things to all men 
> and it's debatable whether it really succeeds.
> 
> It would certainly be worth having in the kernel, however.

I think a much more interesting protocol to have in the kernel would
be Bell Labs' IL.  It's implemented in Plan 9, and they say they are
very happy with its performance.  It's a sequenced packet protocol,
ideal for NFS, CORBA messages and pretty much anything which currently
either implements its own out-of-order + retransmit strategy over UDP
or puts packet boundaries into TCP.

There's a description of the protocol at
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/doc/il.html
I have the barest bones of a start at a linux implementation of it,
if anyone wants to collaborate :-)

-- 
Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai>
"Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of
specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a
painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." - N Stephenson

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