[tor-dev] Connection, Channel and Scheduler - An Intense Trek

[Ian Goldberg]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2017 at 02:28:03PM +1100, teor wrote:
> 
> > On 31 Oct 2017, at 06:57, David Goulet <dgoulet at ev0ke.net> wrote:
> > 
> > * I believe now that we should seriously discuss the relevance of channels.
> >  Originally, the idea was good that is providing an abstraction layer for the
> >  relay to relay handshake and send/process cells related to the protocol. But,
> >  as of now, they are half doing it.
> > 
> >  There is an important cost in code and maintanance of something that is not
> >  properly implemented/finished (channel abstraction) and also something that
> >  is unused. An abstraction implemented only for one thing is not really useful
> >  except maybe to offer an example for others? But we aren't providing a good
> >  example right now imo...
> > 
> >  That being said, we can spend time fixing the channel subsystem, trying to
> >  turn it in a nicer interface, fixing all the issues I've described above (and
> >  I suspect there might be more) so the cell scheduler can play nicely with
> >  channels. Or, we could rip them off eliminating lots of code and reducing our
> >  technical debt. I would like us to think about what we want seriously because
> >  that channel subsystem is _complicated_ and very few of us fully understands
> >  it afaict.
> 
> It depends what the goal of the channel layer is.
> 
> Do we seriously think we will use another protocol in place of TLS?

The channel layer has certainly been used fruitfully in the past for
experiments with other transports, such as UDP-based ones, QUIC-Tor,
etc.  I would be a little sad to see it disappear completely.
-- 
Ian Goldberg
Professor and University Research Chair
Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo