It would be interesting to know why you would choose this over something like the Contiki uIP or lwIP that everything seems to use.
RealityVoid 1 days ago [-]
Not sure if they do for _this_ package, but the Wolf* people's model is usually selling certification packages so you can put their things in stuff that need certifications and you offload liability. You also get people that wrote it and that you can pay for support. I kind of like them, had a short project where I had to call on them for getting their WolfSSL to work with a ATECC508 device and it was pretty good support from them.
jpfr 1 days ago [-]
As the project is GPL’ed I guess they sell a commercial version. GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software. But it can be good marketing to sell the commercial version.
Edit: I meant commercial license
anthonj 12 hours ago [-]
In my company we used their stuff often. They have an optional commercial license for basically all their products. The price was very reasonable as well.
cpach 11 hours ago [-]
“GPL is toxic for embedded commercial software”
Why is that?
bobmcnamara 7 hours ago [-]
Many bare metal or RTOS systems consist of a handful of statically linked programs (one or two bootloaders and the main application), many companies would rather find a non-GPL library rather than open up the rest of the system's code. Sometimes a system contains proprietary code that may not be open sourced as well.
dietr1ch 8 hours ago [-]
He probably meant viral or tried to make a deadly twist on virality
RealityVoid 1 days ago [-]
I think they might sell a commercial version as well. It makes sense with the GPL. But I can't really recall that well.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
You don't need a commercial version, many projects get away with selling just a commercial license to the same version. As long as they have the rights to relicense this works fine.
How does it deal with all the dynamic TCP buffering things where things may get quite large?
Ao7bei3s 14 hours ago [-]
It has a fixed maximum number of concurrent sockets, and each socket has queues backed by per-socket fixed-size transmit and receive buffers (see `rxmem` and `txmem` in `struct tsocket`[1]). This is fine, because in TCP, each side advertises remaining buffer space via the window size header field [2] (possibly with its meaning modified by the window scale option during the initial handshake - see [3] & `struct PACKED tcp_opt_ws`), and possibly also how much it can maximally receive in one packet (via the MSS option on the initial handshake [4]; possibly modified by intermediary systems via MSS clamping). wolfip has unusually small buffer sizes, and hardcodes them via #define, and everything else (e.g. congestion control) is pretty rudimentary too, but otherwise it's pretty much the same as in a "normal" implementation.
Buffer size is the product of bandwidth and delay, so if communicating with something close, it can still go fast.
Had an illustration of this once when my then-employers IT dept set up the desktop IP phones to update from a TFTP server on the other continental land mass. Since TFTP only allows one outstanding packet, everyone outside head office had to wait a long time for their phone to update, while head office didn't see any issue.
If it's a memory-constrained embedded device you're sending a handful of bytes of telemetry every now and then, not aiming for gigabit speeds. In fact it couldn't get to megabit speeds even if it wanted to. For something like that this is perfect.
CyberDildonics 21 hours ago [-]
Are there TCP/IP stacks out there in common use that are allocating memory all the time?
fulafel 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, TCP is pretty hungry for buffers. The bandwidth*delay product can eat gigs of memory on a server. You have to be ready to retransmit anything that's in flight / haven't received the ack for yet.
nly 7 hours ago [-]
The bandwidth delay product for a 10Gbps stream for a 300ms RTT theoretically only requires ~384MB
One option is just to simply keep buffers small and fixed and disconnect blocked clients on write() after some timeout
fulafel 4 minutes ago [-]
We're up to hundreds of gbps per server, have been for some years now. Eg 400 gbps uses a lot even with much smaller avg rtt.
CyberDildonics 6 hours ago [-]
Needing memory doesn't have to mean allocating memory over and over. Memory allocation is expensive. If someone is doing that reusing memory is going to be by far the best optimization.
fulafel 10 minutes ago [-]
Well, allocating and freeing according to need is reusing. Modern TCP perf is not bottlenecked by that.
wmf 19 hours ago [-]
Packets and sockets have to be stored in memory somehow. If you have a fixed pool that you reuse it's basically a slab allocator.
CyberDildonics 17 hours ago [-]
You need some memory but that doesn't mean you would constantly allocate memory. There is a big difference between a few allocations and allocating in a hot loop.
bobmcnamara 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is pretty common.
However sometimes the buffers are pooled so buffer allocator contention only occurs within the network stack or within a particular nic.
1 days ago [-]
sedatk 22 hours ago [-]
It only implements IPv4 which explains to a degree that why IPv6 isn't ubiquitous: it's costly to implement.
hrmtst93837 12 hours ago [-]
If you want IPv6 without dynamic allocation you end up rewriting half the stack anyway so probably not what most embedded engineers are itching to spend budget on. The weird part is that a lot of edge gear will be stuck in legacy-v4 limbo just because nobody wants to own that porting slog which means "ubiquitous IPv6" will keep being a conference slide more than a reality.
preisschild 40 minutes ago [-]
Matter (a smart home connectivity standard in use by many embedded devices) is using IPv6. Doesnt seem to be a problem there.
notepad0x90 21 hours ago [-]
It's just not worth it. the only thing keeping it alive is people being overly zealous over it. if the cost to implement is measured as '1', the cost to administer it is like '50'.
sedatk 21 hours ago [-]
> the only thing keeping it alive is people being overly zealous over it
Hard disagree. It turned out to be great for mobile connectivity and IoT (Matter + Thread).
> the cost to administer it is like '50'.
I'm not sure if that's true. It feels like less work to me because you don't need to worry about NAT or DHCP as much as you need with IPv4.
nicman23 14 hours ago [-]
what. have you seen ipv4 block pricing?
notepad0x90 2 hours ago [-]
there keep arising more solutions, public ip usage hasn't been increasing as it did in past decades either. most new device increase is on mobile where cgnat works ok.
toast0 21 hours ago [-]
Eh. IPv6 is probably cheaper to run compared to running large scale CGNAT. It's well deployed in mobile and in areas without a lot of legacy IPv4 assignments. Most of the high traffic content networks support it, so if you're an eyeball network, you can shift costs away from CGNAT to IPv6. You still have to do both though.
Is it my favorite? No. Is it well supported? Not everywhere. Is it going to win, eventually? Probably, but maybe IPv8 will happen, in which case maybe they learn and it it has a 10 years to 50% of traffic instead of 30 years to 50% of traffic.
notepad0x90 2 hours ago [-]
it depends on who you're talking about but no disagreement with cost for ISPs. For endusers (including CSPs) it's another story.
Even on its own it's hard to support, but for most people they have to maintain a dual stack. v4 isn't going away entirely any time soon.
gnerd00 21 hours ago [-]
my 15 year old Macbook does IPv6 and IPv4 effortlessly
notepad0x90 2 hours ago [-]
that's great, but when you have a networking issue, you have to deal with two stacks for troubleshooting. it would be much less effort to use just ipv4.
You're not paying for IPv4 addresses I'm sure, so did ipv6 solve anything for you? This is why i meant by zealots keeping it alive. you use ipv6 for the principle of it, but tech is suppose to solve problems, not facilitate ideologies.
preisschild 39 minutes ago [-]
> it would be much less effort to use just ipv4.
Or just use IPv6-only. Thats what I do.
Legacy ipv4 only services can be reached via DNS64/NAT64
Rendered at 20:36:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Edit: I meant commercial license
Why is that?
[1] https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfip/blob/60444d869e8f451aa2dca... [2] https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfip/blob/60444d869e8f451aa2dca... [3] https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfip/blob/60444d869e8f451aa2dca... [4] https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfip/blob/60444d869e8f451aa2dca...
Had an illustration of this once when my then-employers IT dept set up the desktop IP phones to update from a TFTP server on the other continental land mass. Since TFTP only allows one outstanding packet, everyone outside head office had to wait a long time for their phone to update, while head office didn't see any issue.
We're finally adding multithreading (https://bugs.passt.top/show_bug.cgi?id=13) these days.
One option is just to simply keep buffers small and fixed and disconnect blocked clients on write() after some timeout
However sometimes the buffers are pooled so buffer allocator contention only occurs within the network stack or within a particular nic.
Hard disagree. It turned out to be great for mobile connectivity and IoT (Matter + Thread).
> the cost to administer it is like '50'.
I'm not sure if that's true. It feels like less work to me because you don't need to worry about NAT or DHCP as much as you need with IPv4.
Is it my favorite? No. Is it well supported? Not everywhere. Is it going to win, eventually? Probably, but maybe IPv8 will happen, in which case maybe they learn and it it has a 10 years to 50% of traffic instead of 30 years to 50% of traffic.
Even on its own it's hard to support, but for most people they have to maintain a dual stack. v4 isn't going away entirely any time soon.
You're not paying for IPv4 addresses I'm sure, so did ipv6 solve anything for you? This is why i meant by zealots keeping it alive. you use ipv6 for the principle of it, but tech is suppose to solve problems, not facilitate ideologies.
Or just use IPv6-only. Thats what I do.
Legacy ipv4 only services can be reached via DNS64/NAT64