molotov
July 28th, 2005, 09:59
"First I want to thank everyone for their great support and numerous donations
to the TCP/IP Cleanup and Optimization[1]! The full funding target has been
reached today. I want thank especially the many individuals who have contributed
a significant amount of money alone. And of course the corporate sponsors which
have shouldered about two thirds of the sum: Pair.net, Solnet.ch, Bytemark.co.uk
and BNC.ch. Any money that still comes in goes to an time extension of up to
one week.


However there is one thing I'm in desperate need of: a precise traffic generator.
If you know someone who can lend me a Smartbits, Ixia or Agilent engine (doesn't
have to be the newest) for about three month I'm all ears. For the routing work
I need to measure the exact pps rates and latency distribution to carve out any
bottlenecks after the new code is in the tree. Just remote access to the traffic
engine or a PC/FreeBSD based traffic generator is not good enough for this purpose
because it lacks precise enough time stamping and I have to run very instrumented
kernels. Alternatively if you can arrange for a super-special deal on such a traffic
engine (used or new) I may be able to buy that through my company and write it off
as investment (CAPEX) if the amount is not too high. It would then be available
for all FreeBSD related work.


My work on the TCP/IP Cleanup and Optimization will start in the week of August 8th.
The next week I'm out of the office and have only spotty email access but I do my
best to reply as fast as possible to any direct emails I get.

In [1] you can see the list of the donors and all the tasks I will perform during
the funded period.

[1] http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html"