On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Thomas White <thomaswh...@riseup.net> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Does anyone in Tor want to name a price to get this task done? Can > then be followed by a match donation to be spent with on whatever you > wish once the multicore has been added.
Hi, Thomas, and congratulations! You've asked a question I wasn't prepared to answer. Here's a thread we had about it today: 18:25 < nickm> So, I assume people have seen the tor-relays/tor-talk thread about "Hey Tor folks, what would you want in exchange for making tor parallelize better" 18:25 < nickm> Do we have a way of even answering that? 18:26 < nickm> If not, I think we should reply to say "This is a generous offer and we need to apologize for taking so long, but it's not been something we had a way of answering before. We'll try to come up with such a way and see what it outputs RSN" 18:26 < nickm> thoughts? 18:44 < arma4> sounds plausible. i think the issue is a combination of not enough developerpower and also not enough money 18:44 < arma4> a short small amount of money wouldn't be enough to overcome the first issue, 18:45 < arma4> and we need to overcome both 18:47 < nickm> yeah. I think that anything less than a year fulltime of dev time, plus overhead and incidentals, can't work out here. 18:47 < nickm> plus, no timeline promised 18:48 < nickm> arma4: thoughts? 18:49 < arma4> are there any incremental steps that can be done, by other people, in the mean time? 18:49 < nickm> in theory sure 18:49 < arma4> it seems like a wildly unpredictable amount of work 18:50 < nickm> in practice nobody who isn't a Solid Wizard is going to get much done here 18:50 < arma4> and it's not even clear, to me, what architecture we should use to parallelize cleanly 18:50 < arma4> all of this ipc stuff sounds great in theory until you try to run the program on ios or something and then boy are you surprised 18:51 < nickm> I have an architecture in mind for circuit crypto 18:51 < nickm> for tls, I have no bloody clue 18:52 < toml> but would we feel good about taking a shot if there was one full-time equivalent devoted to the problem? 18:52 < arma4> maybe explaining very briefly why it isn't trivial, and why it is going to be hard to do right, would be helpful for the folks wondering why we don't just do it already 18:52 < toml> arma: I agree that we should take the opportunity to explain the challenge 18:52 < arma4> toml: and if we had said full-time developer, would this be the most important thing to have her work on? 18:53 < arma4> so far the answer has been "no, other things are more important" 18:53 < toml> well, it would be an answer to the question: what would it take? 18:53 < toml> so if they put cash on the barrel head, we could dedicate. (I would bet there would be other associated benefits not strictly related) 18:54 < toml> probably the cost would be too steep, but they would know where we stand. (part of the education piece) 18:55 * nickm suggests that we just copy-and-paste this conversation into the thread 18:56 < arma4> sounds good 18:58 < toml> arma: and let's always use the term "full-time equivalent." There is an industry standard for a FTE amount, but we reserve the right to apportion those funds among more than one person. 18:58 < nickm> any more to add ? 19:00 < nickm> I feel like we could safely say "More than 80k and less than 500k" on this today, and if those numbers don't scare people away, invest time into digging into getter numbers 19:01 < arma4> sounds good. it is basically a big architectural change inside tor. our work on better testing and better modularity is (slowly) moving us in the right direction as we wait. 19:01 < toml> I would say minimum $100K, as this would leapfrog several other priorities. 19:02 < nickm> also overhead 19:02 < toml> si 19:02 < nickm> yeah, good point, toml 19:03 < nickm> OTOH, we can also mention the $0 price point: for no money at all, we will _care_ about this, because we already do. And at some point eventually, somebody will surely work on it in their free time, one of these days 19:03 < toml> (and that is too low for a FT equivalent, but it is enought to motivate us to explore 19:03 < arma4> heck, not only do we care, but we even wrote up a thing on how it might be done 19:04 < toml> arma: should we share that? (or share it again?) 19:05 < arma4> nickm should point to it in his response i hope 19:06 < arma4> he wrote it so hopefully he knows what is the best thing to point at :) 19:06 < nickm> well,it's quite old and maybe I should revise some morning/afternoon when I am smarter 19:08 < toml> perhaps leave it as is — show how long we have been thinking on this. Then maybe a add brief bit on things we have learned since, at your leisure. 19:08 < arma4> that way lies paralysis. which is almost like parallelization, but not quite. :) 18:13 < nickm> ok. So I am going to add this to topics for the wednesday core tor dev meeting, and send it to the ml, unless somebody objects? I think the URL I was asked to add was https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/projects/Tor/MultithreadedCrypto , but that's rather outdated. tl;dr: more data really soon now. We are bad at doing cost estimates of this kind, and hope to get better RSN. Thanks for the interest! peace, -- Nick -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
