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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

I think from their perspective the (Windows and Android) kernel is what causes ossification so moving transport into the app, along with encryption, solves it.

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There are also the "middle boxes" that networking researchers talk a lot about. Such devices sit in the middle of a link and easily become unhappy if the packets transmitted do not fit some (possibly outdated or buggy) predefined scheme. Think of cooperate firewalls with "deep pack inspection" that intelligently shut down connections they do not like. Once all middle box vendors start to assume a certain way that a protocol (say, TCP) should behave, it's impossible to change the protocol because it will break the middle boxes.

Encrypting QUIC datagrams prevents middle box vendors from assuming anything about QUIC (at least the encrypted part), so that QUIC can change if there's a need in the future without worrying about supporting legacy middle boxes. Although I do agree using UDP does not allow QUIC to break out from any ossification in UDP itself.

Yes, exactly. See this lwn article for more discussion of ossification: https://lwn.net/Articles/745590/

> SCTP has been around for years, but middleboxes still do not recognize it and tend to block it. As a result, SCTP cannot be reliably used on the net. Actually deploying a new IP-based protocol, he said, is simply impossible on today's Internet.

Well, IPv6 shows that it's hard, but possible.

Also see how new broadcast "protocols" were forced on TV manufacturers by various governments worldwide.

Most enterprise security vendors at the moment are advising their customers to block QUIC at the perimeter to force fallback to HTTPS so their TLS decryption can function.

There are valid, ethical reasons for an organization to want to see unencrypted network traffic at their perimeter, and until that problem is solved, you better not go QUIC-only if you are in the business to make money.

You're forgetting the rest of userspace that exists between the application and the kernel.

> moving transport into the app, along with encryption, solves it

This is only a good idea if the application's development moves faster than both the kernel and the rest of the userspace platform - which is a fine strategy if you're targeting old or obsolete platforms, but probably a bad idea if you're targeting currently-supported operating systems with a long support lifetime (like Windows).

It's a bad idea when a major security issue or compatibility problem with a transport or encryption library pops-up (which happens all the time, btw) - as it's part of your application then you don't benefit when the OS vendor ships a security update that your application gets for free. If you used dynamic-load+linking at runtime instead of a statically-linked encryption library then you might get lucky with a drop-in .so/.dll replacement without needing a rebuild, but YMMV.

Doing everything in the app instead of letting the parent platform handle it by default is kinda the software-engineering equivalent of libertarian ideological thinking: it only benefits you if you (and your team) really are far better than the state - otherwise you'll quickly run into problems - and it isn't suitable for the vast majority of the ecosystem.

Let's be honest; we're talking about Chrome here. Chrome auto-updates and Windows (pre-10) did not so bugs will be fixed faster in Chrome. Everybody else is along for the ride.

Right - so in Chrome's case then Google using QUIC as an in-app service is probably fine, as indeed, I trust Google to ship fixes and updates much faster than Microsoft. Also it's far more likely that enterprises have Windows Updates blocked or delayed than Chrome updates - and with Microsoft updates you have to wait for Patch Tuesday every month unless it's something really bad.

My point still stands though, that if you aren't prepared to support an "evergreen" software product for the life of your users, then you should still support OS-provided services, even if you do have your own QUIC support baked-in to your product.

I agree that for updatability it should be something that can be shutdown, reloaded, restarted as simply and with least risk possible. Now I'm thinking that it'll be easier to checkpoint/restore a quic connection than any other thing based on tcp or hidden in the kernel, so you could even do zero-downtime update.

I'm thinking let's just use something like netty or zmq over a simple ip+icmp interface, socket or not. Instead of having everyone learn some ossified quic kernel api... And since everything will soon move to io_uring let's wrap that thing in high-level APIs.

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