2004-10-18 · in Ideas · 127 words

One of the possible advantages to using occamnet as a router would be that it could scale very well to multiple-CPU systems. However, occamnet at the moment has bottlenecks that prevent this, and I'd need to figure out how to remove them.

In many cases, this could be done by switching conventional channels for shared channels, and having multiple processes doing the same job (one per CPU). For instance, the IP checksum checker is such a bottleneck: there's no reason why you couldn't have multiple checkers runing in parallel sharing the same input and output, though, since you don't have to maintain IP packet ordering. (Although it may be desirable to do so -- I'd imagine some existing programs won't cope with out-of-order UDP very well, for instance...)