Hi, it's probably been at least 10 years now since there was a talk about the design of network abstractions within an operating system kernel. I think it may have been by someone from the BSD camp, as opposed as to someone from Linux. The slides from the talk really elegantly addressed issues about the kind of devices and various complexities around abstracting driver interfaces whilst dealing with differing protocols, hardware interfaces, and other issues. I would really appreciate finding this talk again. Please help, I'm sorry I can't provide more details. I seem to have lost my old bookmark.
To add some further recollection. The talk wasn't about what the code presently was, it was aspirational: about how the structure could be wholly rearchitectured. The goal was simplicity. In networking, you have protocols which a varied and can be mixed and matched and layered, devices which can be plain or have different and varied off-load capabilities, things like power management and hot-plugging, and yet in all this you want to architect code that is modular and has maximal re-use and yet is also high-performance. This talk predated things like wireguard (which presents as a device implemented in software) and network namespaces but you got the impression that it was feeling out these possibilities without explicitly articulating them.
Was it Van Jacobson's Netchannels? <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/susantsahani/van-jaconson-netchannels" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/susantsahani/van-jaconson-netchan...</a>
Some of this makes me think of the Exokernel architecture [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel</a>