AFAIK those sold relatively well, considering the TCO of both sides (NICs were very expensive and there were like a dozen companies vying for position once upon a time). They were also interesting because they were cut-through. CX4 was noticeably lower latency than SFP+. So a very fast, but feature limited architecture which is probably why other players like Cisco and then Arista (aka Broadcom) took over.
You can, to some degree, do an online defrag with zfs rewrite -P now although it is not the primary intent. The displayed fragementation may not go down or may even increase, but all the files will go through the allocation policy. zfs fragmentation display is a little misleading, it measures free space fragmentation.
I don't think there is a ton of overlap. tokio is appropriate for general userspace apps, ranging anywhere from a CLI, GUI, API or web app. DPDK and SPDK are specialized fast paths for building network data paths and storage solutions that come with tradeoffs: DPDK uses poll mode drivers, outside of the operating system, which have various implications including busy waiting and taking over the interface. That is why DPDK is fast, no kernel/userspace context switching and copies, and the drivers are tuned for the polling model. But it's not a general purpose building block.
Fwiw with ef_vi you have full control over the event queue - you don't need to busy-spin it, you can choose whatever strategy you prefer.
> tokio is appropriate for general userspace apps
Yep, and for those I wouldn't recommend it. But tokio is also widely used in performance-critical infrastructure and web services. For those I'd say it can definitely be worth taking a second look at kernel bypass.
ef_vi is a solarflare proprietary feature which is now a support product, AMD moved on to Pensando. Once you move away from busy poll, you rapidly lost grounds to use DPDK. The PMD is a deliberate design to elide latency and lower interconnect taxes like PCIe traffic and cache/memory bandwidth by batching queue maintenance, that is the bargain made with a PMD. The field opens to OS native fast paths which have fewer downsides outside of that niche. Application developers are rarely concerned with this because it's far from where the bottleneck is for them.. a web service is rarely primarily a data mover, while a proxy is. Tokio has more in common with Golang than something like DPDK.
Definitely an accomplished architect, there are a lot of fine construction details in these photos. So much that it makes the IT/low voltage installation look like a hack job.
Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.
There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc.
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars. Some of these are fun to use without reducing value.
Most of these things have large categories that are inherently disinflationary. You can't make a new authentic vintage Ferrari. Whether they are fungible is the main problem and case by case. But you generally don't do it to build wealth, it's an expression of it that happens to have yields if taken seriously.
The mystery of how a computer works is what drove me. I was interested in the mass produced microprocessor based systems. Once I found per integrated circuit system it became a combination of logic and hand crafted boards.
This is is the area I focused on. I'm now at point where I would rather shed objects than collect them. I will probably hold on to the rarest handmade objects. The mass produced from the late 70's to the early 2000's I would like to get rid of.
I run a web to text usenet gateway and it has been an interesting challenge to scale it to deal with this. Article fetch and retrieval is extremely efficient but I apply JWZ threading and that can cause a single article to make a number of overview requests which are more expensive depending on the depth. I solve it currently with caching but will eventually implement a thread backend on the NNTP side to keep thread roots updated at insertion time and it will be a very cheap read request.
One persistent thought is what are people doing with this data? I get that people want to train models, but I also have a hard time believing there are more than a hundred companies with the resources to spider the web like this and actually do anything meaningful with all that data. Academics, researchers, and people working on lower level innovation are probably well off with CommonCrawl.. only people trying to make frontier models really need fresh and endless data right?
Wow this is a deep dive, most people focus on the PC era. The Ultima/Impression were some of the very first commercial PCI cards, behind maybe NCR SCSI. Another interesting vendor in that era was Number Nine.
Number Nine was amazing. But even more amazing was the computer integrator / producer that shipped their computers with Number Nines. The company Intergraph.
I haven't thought of Number Nine in years, but the mention reminded me that the BIOS on some of their cards displayed a Beatles lyric quote during boot.
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