Honest question: How is it that Google is the company that's always doing all of this involved technical work? Or is it just that their work gets publicity?
Éric Dumazet (author of the patch) is this highly productive guy working on network latency issues. He helped get CoDel into the kernel, and worked on TCP small queues (https://lwn.net/Articles/507065/) and the fair queue scheduler (https://lwn.net/Articles/564978/). Looking at the email addresses he used, I think he started working on the network stack on his spare time, while employed at SFR, a French telco. He implemented an in-kernel JIT for BPF (https://lwn.net/Articles/437981/), speeding up packet filtering; now that BPF is fast it is also used for performance profiling (filtering and aggregating in kernel) and syscall filtering.
There are of course others working in these areas, but I think Google has been going after them: Van Jacobson is a high-profile example. Dave Taht is still subsiding on ramen though (https://www.patreon.com/dtaht).
For the last five years I've worked myself to the bone, mostly unpaid, to solve the "bufferbloat" problem - first by organizing and leading the team that solved it, and giving away, for free, the ideas and code for anyone to use! And I've spent tons of time later convincing standards organizations like the IETF to make the ideas standard in new equipment - and also open source makers like openwrt to retrofit the fq_codel and cake fixes into millions of older yet upgradable home routers, and helping ISPs, vendors and chipmakers understand the both the need for the fq_codel fixes, and how to implement them.
wow - thanks for posting about David Taht. someone like Netflix or Google should get him on their payroll.
At least in the case of the Linux kernel, Google is actually around the 9th or 10th largest corporate contributor. [1] I'm not sure if they deserve to be particularly specially exalted, given the vast body of kernel work unrelated to them.
Looking at the list here: [1] Most of the top employers are hardware companies, and therefore likely to contribute mostly driver patches. For example, the rankings by LoC for this release list AMD as over a third of the contributions, almost certainly because of their new AMDGPU driver. Drivers are important, of course, but hardly news-worthy. Red Hat is always near the top of the list, and they do a lot of both the drudge work and the interesting stuff, but I feel as though everyone in the Linux community already knows that.
I really do wonder what kind of numbers we would get if we did the same on a number of other large projects. I keep having the feeling that RH have a massive amount of say in the Linux ecosystem, for better or worse...
Clearly for better. Most of the Google projects I've come across over the years are close to the throw-it-over-the-wall end of open source development, as opposed to Red Hat which seems to me to mostly let individuals participate.
Their CEO has written a management book (or perhaps anti-management) which explains their take on these things in some detail.
I'm pretty sure that if Red Hat had been running Android, it wouldn't be a big fork.
They have tens of thousands of engineers and work with vast amounts of open source software. Only a few other companies are of comparable scale in terms of sheer software engineering. I think it's inevitable that they'd have a very large footprint across the industry.
They have the money the hire those that can fix the issues. The issues also greatly affects their business, so they allocate resources to look into them. Less latency in the network stack means faster response time, means more ads delivered in less time. And a smoother user experience.
