Improving TCP performance, eBPF in the Linux kernel, sending packets faster in go, time to repair undersea cables, TLS certificates, netlab and the NTP pool
TCP remains the most widely used reliable transport protocol. During the last years, QUIC has started to replace TLS over TCP for some applications such as HTTP/3. This is not the first time that new transport protocols are proposed to replace TCP. During the late 1980s, XTP and similar protocols aimed at being faster than TCP that was already to be considered as an old protocol. David Clark, Van Jacobson and their colleagues showed that TCP implementations could run much faster. They introduced a fast path, i.e. a part of the TCP implementation where the stack is optimized to process the next packet if it arrives in sequence. Improving the performance of TCP implementations is an ongoing effort. A recent set of patches proposed by Coco Li for the Linux kernel achieves 30-40% performance improvements on AMD processors by better exploiting their caches.