[arch-dev-public] Bringing Multipath TCP kernel (linux-mptcp) to [community]

[Levente Polyak]

On June 11, 2017 12:47:07 AM GMT+02:00, Baptiste Jonglez <baptiste at bitsofnetworks.org> wrote:
>At that point, Multipath TCP is mostly useful to researchers and
>tinkerers, because both ends of a TCP connection need to run the
>modified
>kernel (otherwise, it just falls back to regular TCP).
>
>However, I still think it would be useful in [community]:
>
>1) One nice use-case is link aggregation, where you basically tunnel
> traffic over a Multipath TCP connection.  You may want to build such a
>   tunnelling system with Arch.
>


That there may be useful things provided by multipath per say is out of question, it's more how useful it is to package yet another kernel into the repository. It's very much an edge case variant at this point (as you pointed out yourself).


>2) Not everybody has the resources to build a kernel (time, CPU,
>memory, disk...)
>


If you're a researcher or thinker you will somehow manage to compile a kernel from the AUR and the resources to do so are not really that high. 


>So, I would say the project is active and focused on the long term.
>There have been minor releases in-between these major releases, to
>integrate bugfixes and update to latest stable kernel.  For instance,
>v0.91.2 was based on linux 4.1.35.
>


Which is quite ancient actually. Also the mentioned support includes handling of vulnerabilities by our security team. Each kernel, especially when not in sync with neither LTS nor the default, creates overhead when handling and researching patches and vulnerabilities as they are part of the official repositories. 
This can get pretty cumbersome and personally I don't quite see the justification fur the additional burden it creates.
My humble opinion is that multipath sounds nice but belongs into the AUR rather then into our repository.


Cheers, 
Levente