[LockAndLol]

Isn't IP implemented at the hardware level nowadays? Is it still possible to buy any consumer-grade network hardware that allows to replace IP?

It would be great if the site presented a side-by-side comparison of IP vs ouroboros (and had an acronym btw) for people to have a quick overview instead of digging through documentation.

[convolvatron]

there may be various kinds of accelerations...but it pretty much has to be possible to send and receive ethernet frames

(edit: and operationally you probably want to just make an overlay/tunnel network to develop your new network layer)

[dstaesse]

In most of our Ouroboros deployments (meaning: in the lab) we did just that. We use a raw packet interface (bpf on mac, raw sockets on linux) and send Ouroboros traffic on top of Ethernet.

The fun thing is that when we compared throughput to UDP/IP, Ouroboros is a bit slower for packets below 1460 bytes, because the NIC has something called "Generic Segment Offload (GSO)" which cheats a bit and send UDP traffic as larger chunks over the kernel boundary. We have no such optimization (yet). But when we started sending jumbo frames, Ouroboros was faster than UDP/IP over Ethernet because the GSO wasn't implemented for UDP jumbo frames (not pointing fingers, nobody does that).

And this brings me to another thing. Nitpicking of course. But that is what Ouroboros is about. Picking all the nits we could find. It's one for the connoisseurs.

Ethernet has a minimum frame size that is dictated by Layer 1 and has to do with collision detection and the transmission delay/cable length. For good ol' 10 base-T it's 64 bytes. For GbE the minimum frame size for Ethernet is 512 bytes. Small Ethernet frames under 64 bytes are called runt frames. Ethernet has a length field to allow for padding.

Now the interesting part in the standards. Ethernet frames are padded to 64 bytes. But GbE ethernet frames are not padded to 512 bytes. They use something called carrier extension (and frame bursting, but let's not complicate things too much).

So there is a Layer 1 problem (minimum frame size because of cable length). The original Ethernet "fixed" this with a LENGTH field in Layer 2. While the receiver was reading the correct amount of received bytes, if it was 64, it could mean a padded Ethernet frame. Ethernet II (DIX) made things worse. The Ethernet length field is now interpreted as an EtherType, indicating the Layer 3 protocol. And the layer 3 protocol now has to have a length field to fix the Layer 1 problem. Sigh.

GbE solves it right here, right now. It does carrier extension and reports the correct amount of bytes to layer 2. But it pads to 64 bytes for compatibility.

Ouroboros' protocols have no length field. Read the details on the heartbleed bug if you want to know why this matters.