Everyone Should Build Their Own Network Stack

uuneven9434 about 3 hours ago 30 commentsRead Article on blog.lyc8503.net

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Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rbanffy•4 minutes ago

Back in the 8-bit days, we all wrote our own kernel process schedulers in order to make simple games. If you had an Apple II and wanted music, you'd need to make yours a hard real time one as well.

intrasight•about 1 hour ago

My first job was at Westinghouse instrumenting a nuclear power plant. Our entire hardware-software package was a freebie given to the customer as part of a $200 million refueling contract (and that's in 1988 dollars). We, a team of 10, created a bespoke application stack which was effectively a web browser. The client machines were Sun 3 workstations. The server was some industrial mini computer that didn't have a TCP/IP stack - so we did in fact have to roll our own network stack.

RealityVoid•34 minutes ago

Hah, the first engineering job I had was on Ovation DCS doing power plant controls. That system traces the lineage to the WDPF systems.

Was the server you mention here the actual DCS? With the Motorola CPU's? Running vxworks? Pretty cool recognizing something niche that is still, vaguely familiar. :)

_pdp_•17 minutes ago

Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted.

Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.

tonyhart7•12 minutes ago

if you have time, money, energy, attention to do it then yes

but unfortunately not everyone have same opprtunities

_pdp_•3 minutes ago

My point is that it is a great way to learn and be more appreciative of what is done and why - network stacks, graphic stacks, web, etc - before being too critical of them.

Besides, statements such as "$7B for a proxy" or "it is just a wrapper" or "we can build it in-house" mostly come from those that have not had any measure of the scope due to not having any real experience with the said problem.

Hoftheater•about 1 hour ago

A while back I wrote an FPGA-based minimal network stack to work with the MRMAC hard IP of an AMD VC1902 with basically the same functionality: ARP, IPv4, ICMP Echo reply and UDP send/receive. I added the bare bare minimum to get UDP GRO working on the receiver side (Linux).

I also enjoyed the learning experience and works perfectly fine at up to 100G. But I definitely appreciate that I didn't have to go through the same pain under Linux where this stuff just works.

amoss•about 2 hours ago

Good to see that people still have this spirit of rolling their sleeves up and doing something like this for fun. Underneath it there is a very real point about mono-cultures and the increased magnitude of the impact of a risk, although more eyes checking one implementation should reduce the probability.

andai•38 minutes ago

Monoculture. It's like when all bananas used to be clones of each other and a disease wiped out the whole species.

tmountain•13 minutes ago

Used to be? Isn’t this still the case?

dromologist•about 2 hours ago

Prediction: as agentic code generation gets better, more and more code will be written JIT for it to be executed for security reasons. The engineer of the future is not only the one who uses agents to code, he uses agents to code each time "the" program is ran.

mihaelm•about 1 hour ago

What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.

daishi55•about 1 hour ago

why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?

patmorgan23•9 minutes ago

If you're doing formal verification, why are you JIT generating Code? Is the formal verification also being JITd? How do you know the agent wrote a good spec?

mihaelm•about 1 hour ago

Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too.

I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.

compounding_it•about 1 hour ago

Because the verification would also be done by something non deterministic and then that’s a paradox.

dakolli•24 minutes ago

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago

I doubt it. It seems far more likely that such code will be written just once by LLMs, but in a way that allows its claimed guarantees to be formally verified (e.g. in Lean). At that point there’s no need to JIT an implementation each time.

TacticalCoder•about 1 hour ago

My bet is one ultra-hardened, minimal, front-facing system which does N-modular redundancy which N systems, each written on a different stack/different language.

The hardened software picks the computation that wins the majority.

It's not an issue to write all the implementations in the various stacks/languages: we'll have better and better LLMs to help us.

This shall bring security and shall allow to detect shitload of bugs (both in the implementation itself but also in the stack).

Heck, this could even be compatible with GP: one of the implementation could be JIT'e by a LLM, others could be written in advance (and Lean formally verified). Not sure which sense it'd make though.

I'm 99.9% sure it's coming for if it's not, I'll make one.

N_Lens•about 2 hours ago

I disagree

p-e-w•about 2 hours ago

So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should

- write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system

- learn 3-5 foreign languages

- travel extensively

- learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace

- have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do

- read obscure Russian poetry

- “deeply” engage in 5-10 different philosophical practices and meditation techniques

- work out regularly, but according to strictly scientific principles, which you first have to research by reading a dozen books

- appreciate fine art, homestead food, and family life

Sorry folks, y’all are just Instagrammers with MSc’s. Most people here probably have no idea how ridiculous this world appears once you step out for a year or two and then take a look back in.

andai•34 minutes ago

That's a great list actually.

Let's invert it.

Everyone should: be computer illiterate, monolingual, never leave their home town, use left-pad, be regular illiterate, sedentary, uncultured, unlanded, and... alienated from their family?

Well, I'm off to a great start!

GPerson•35 minutes ago

What’s wrong with aspiring to do any or even all of those things? Those sound like nice things.

adamddev1•about 2 hours ago

It was a joke if you read the article.

sva_•about 1 hour ago

Glad to see you two read only the title, not the article; that fulfills the cliche.

And in your list you forgot taking a lecture in category theory.

p-e-w•about 1 hour ago

Oh, the list wasn’t meant to be exhaustive. I also didn’t mention Homotopy Type Theory, Stoicism, and urban beekeeping.

contingencies•about 1 hour ago

Much more fun on microcontrollers!