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by jmillikin 1402 days ago 

  > It’s obviously proprietary: it’s non-standard and specific to a
  > single vendor.
That's not how people typically use "proprietary" when referring to open-source code developed collectively by multiple vendors, universities, and thousands of independent contributors.

  > What is the whole idea, though? [...] this particular implementation
  > uses io_uring instead of something non-proprietary like RDMA, is just
  > an implementation detail.
When performance matters, sometimes implementation details are the whole idea.

According to the patch's author at <https://lwn.net/Articles/904638/>, ublk has about twice the throughput of NBD.
1 comments
trasz 1402 days ago
>That's not how people typically use "proprietary" when referring to open-source code

Indeed, many people believe that source code being available somehow magically makes things non-proprietary. Not sure where that belief came from. An API is proprietary when it 1. Doesn't comply with existing standards, 2. Isn't interoperable, and 3. Is controlled by a single entity.

>multiple vendors

It comes from IBM/RedHat - a single commercial entity, not “thousands of independent contributors”. But yes, if it was a proper community project then it of course wouldn’t be proprietary.

>twice the throughput

Compared to NBD which can’t use RDMA at all. Again: the idea is old and not bad, it’s just that this particular implementation looks like another case of NIH.

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