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Version 3.15

    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
   10: follow-on to iperf2.  This was seen to be necessary to fill the
   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