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1.1       misho       1: Subject:  iperf3 status, April 2017
                      2: 
                      3: This is the first of a series of (maybe periodic?) updates about
                      4: iperf3 development:
                      5: 
                      6: State of the iperf3 World, as seen from ESnet...
                      7: ------------------------------------------------
                      8: 
                      9: iperf3 was originally written to be a "better", more maintainable
1.1.1.2 ! misho      10: follow-on to iperf2.  This was seen to be necessary to fill the
1.1       misho      11: requirements for the perfSONAR project (http://www.perfsonar.net).
                     12: 
                     13: In the past few years, iperf2 development has been restarted by Bob
                     14: McMahon of Broadcom.  He (and other contributors) have fixed a number
                     15: of problems with iperf2 and added some new features
                     16: (https://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf2/).  We're happy to observe
                     17: that iperf2 is once again under active development, and we have
                     18: started discussing ways in which these two projects could productively
                     19: interact.
                     20: 
                     21: We note that iperf3 lacks several features found in iperf2, for
                     22: example multicast tests, bidirectional tests, multi-threading, and
                     23: official Windows support.  Given the active state of iperf2
                     24: development and maintenance, we feel that the needs of users requiring
                     25: such functionality are best met by using a recent version of iperf2
                     26: instead of waiting for them to be backported or reimplemented in
                     27: iperf3.
                     28: 
                     29: ESnet's main interest in iperf3 is for testing high-performance
                     30: Research and Education (R&E) networks, especially as a part of the
                     31: perfSONAR toolkit.  iperf3 can be useful in other circumstances as
                     32: well, but high-speed R&E network performance testing will remain the
                     33: primary use case.  (Much of iperf2's recent development
                     34: has focused on the use of UDP for end-to-end latency testing on a
                     35: broad range of platforms, although it too is useful for many other
                     36: testing scenarios.)
                     37: 
                     38: iperf3 Support
                     39: --------------
                     40: 
                     41: We're trying to work down the support backlog for iperf3.  To that
                     42: end, we've been aggressively triaging iperf3 issues in the issue
                     43: tracker on GitHub.  Over the past several weeks, we've gone from about
                     44: 180 open issues to less than 75.  A number of these issues were user
                     45: questions, not bug reports or enhancement requests.  We're now
                     46: discouraging the use of the iperf3 issue tracker for questions.
                     47: Instead we'd like users to either use the mailing list
                     48: (iperf-dev@google-groups.com) or to look to various question sites on
                     49: the Internet such as Stack Overflow (http://www.stackoverflow.com).
                     50: 
                     51: We're happy to accept enhancement requests, although it should be
                     52: noted that ESnet's time commitments to iperf3 are somewhat limited and
                     53: we need to prioritize our work to match our own requirements.  We have
                     54: begun using the "Help Wanted" label in the issue tracker on GitHub to
                     55: indicate requests we agree with (or at least don't object to), but
                     56: which we don't have the time to work on ourselves.  These are good
                     57: candidates for someone in the community to work on and submit as a
                     58: pull request.
                     59: 
                     60: Pull requests are still encouraged, as long as they're compatible with
                     61: ESnet's goals and requirements for iperf3.  If you're contemplating a
                     62: code change that would have a major, fundamental change on the iperf3
                     63: architecture, we strongly encourage discussion with the iperf3
                     64: maintainers before doing a significant amount of work.
                     65: 
                     66: Some of the above considerations are now documented in GitHub
                     67: templates that we've recently installed for new issues, pull requests,
                     68: and contribution guidelines.
                     69: 
                     70: To make it easier for new users with common questions, we have created
                     71: a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list, which is now available on the
                     72: iperf3 Web site, at:
                     73: 
                     74: http://software.es.net/iperf/faq.html
                     75: 
                     76: Future Plans
                     77: ------------
                     78: 
                     79: In the near-term, we're planning another iperf3 release that will
                     80: include some recently added changes.  Because some of the changes are
                     81: rather large, we're considering basing this release off the mainline
                     82: which would make it the first 3.2 release, rather than try to backport
                     83: these changes and make another "bugfix" 3.1 release.  No decisions
                     84: have been made yet.
                     85: 
                     86: The main changes (already on the master branch) are authentication
                     87: (#517), a more fine-grained pacing timer (#460), and some portability
                     88: fixes.  We'd appreciate any testing and feedback that users in the
                     89: community could give on these.
                     90: 
                     91: Thanks for your interest and support of iperf3,
                     92: 
                     93: Bruce Mah
                     94: Software Engineering Group
                     95: ESnet