Brian Gupta wrote:
>> What if people in OpenSolaris pick this code up and fix it?
>
> I'd imagine there would be nothing preventing them from fixing it,
> testing it and them proposing to reintegrate it.
>
> Remember the code will still exist in the repository if someone wants
> to pick this up down the road.
>
> My vote, is to strip out anything that is useless, and/or serves no
> planned/committed purpose. It just leads to code rot, that infects
> everything it touches.
>
> If you mean by this someone wants to pick this up right now, and fix
> and test it, and continue to maintain it, I think that would be a
> reason to reconsider.
Actually, quite apart from bit-rot, there is one compelling reason to
remove the code out _now_ if nobody is using. That is that this code
inserts somethings on a few hotpaths that have a measurable negative
impact on performance. Removing this code will improve the performance
of IP forwarding in certain pathological cases (64-byte packets).
If someone wants to pick up the project to redesign this, then he or she
should have a chat with Erik and myself ... I think we have some ideas
for how to implement something like this so that it does not penalize
the hot code paths.
-- Garrett
