Aggressive (Network) Drivers...

[jsbowden]

Man, I thought Vista's network stack was aggressive, and then I met Windows 7. It does all kinds of nifty on the fly TCP optimization (sliding TCP window sizing, variable on the fly MTU, MRU, and MSS values, and rapid scaling up of data throughput as best as I can tell), which are all anticipating ten, forty, and hundred gigabit LANs as normal and expected (and moving data across links like that at wire speed is HARD). Vista's network stack is far better than XP's, and it looks like Windows 7's network stack is Vista's on overdrive. This is all well and good, except when it totally takes over our connection to the outside world and nothing else can get manage to grab any bandwidth. Current incarnations of *BSD and Linux are also doing these same things, for the same reasons. If we manage to get past our current problems and really upgrade our network infrastructure, the future is going to be awesome. The future here being half a decade away.