post: new article: one year after

A small retrospective and what's next.

Signed-off-by: Matthieu Baerts (NGI0) <[email protected]>

_posts/2025-01-27-one-year-NGI0-Core.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title:  "One year of NGI0 Core support"
+---
+
+A bit more than one year ago, I started the [Angel Project]({% post_url
+2024-01-01-Angel-Project %}): improving the "deployability" of Multipath TCP. A
+project supported by [NGI0 Core](https://nlnet.nl/core), a fund established by
+[NLnet](https://nlnet.nl). Before starting, I had good planning, something to
+keep me busy for the following months. Not everything happened as expected, but
+on the bright side, the impact of this project is probably higher than what I
+expected! Read on to find out more about that!
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Retrospective
+
+When I'm thinking about what happened over the last year, I could say that I'm a
+bit disappointed, simply because I didn't manage to finish all the tasks I
+initially planned. But that feels wrong: yes, I didn't have time to finish some
+of them, but I have been **really** busy on many other aspects, which, at the
+end, had a very positive impact on Multipath TCP in general, but also in kernel
+testing in the Linux Network subsystem.
+
+As mentioned in a few of my previous blog posts, a lot of time has been spent
+around the "maintenance"[^maintenance]. This time was and is still crucial for
+the survival of the project, and to gain confidence of new users. For example,
+**a lot** of various issues have been fixed. Without these fixes, and their
+backports to stable versions, new features would have been nice to have, but
+either tarnished by pre-existing bugs, or simply not implementable.
+
+Note that a part of the "maintenance"[^maintenance] was dedicated to migrate and
+stabilise the CI system. A part of this work was also beneficial for the Linux
+Network subsystem with [NIPA](https://github.com/linux-netdev/nipa/). Thanks to
+all of that, I was able to join and contribute to the last
+[Netconf](https://netdev.bots.linux.dev/netconf/2024/index.html) with so many
+brilliant and nice Linux developers! This part benefits a lot more people.
+
+[^maintenance]: "Maintenance" is a generic term which for a kernel maintainer of
+    an active subtree includes: communication with the community, organising
+    regular meetings, answering questions, tracking, analysing and fixing bugs,
+    fixing issues with anything related to the workflow like the CI and other
+    tools and services, refactoring code to ease the inclusion of new features
+    or fixes, reviewing and accepting work from others, sending modifications to
+    be included in the official Linux kernel, helping with the backports, and
+    doing the different follow-up.
+
+Tasks that had probably the most important impact were not directly on the
+kernel side, but around:
+
+- The totally reworked [website](https://www.mptcp.dev) can now reply to most
+  questions from new and existing users: what is MPTCP, how can it help, how to
+  set it up, what apps devs need to do, how to contribute, etc.
+
+- The documentation has been improved (or created) on different sides, e.g.
+  [IPRoute](https://man.archlinux.org/man/core/iproute2/ip-mptcp.8.en), the
+  [Linux Kernel](https://docs.kernel.org/networking/mptcp.html),
+  [mptcpd](https://mptcpd.mptcp.dev/doc/html/), etc.
+
+- MPTCP is natively supported in more programming languages, applications and
+  Linux distributions, see this [page](https://www.mptcp.dev/apps.html). To name
+  a few: Apache HTTP, cURL, HAProxy, Lighttpd, SystemD, GoLang (the next 1.24
+  version will have all stream connections (TCP) supporting MPTCP by default on
+  the server side), OpenWrt (enabled by default on the kernel side), etc.
+
+- Various users and companies are then becoming interested in the technology,
+  e.g. Marek at CloudFlare wrote a nice technical [blog
+  post](https://blog.cloudflare.com/multi-path-tcp-revolutionizing-connectivity-one-path-at-a-time/)
+  about the current situation using Ubuntu and a generic 6.8 kernel.
+
+Looking from that side, I should be happy about the results, and force me to
+take some (hopefully) deserved time off at some point to finally "_recharge my
+batteries_" :)
+
+## What's next?
+
+In the short term, the activities around the second part of December were quite
+calm, which allowed me to continue the work on a performance lab dedicated to
+MPTCP and focused on tracking regressions linked to its packet scheduler. 2025
+didn't continue like the previous year finished: various instabilities in the
+tests -- showing real issues in the code, exposed by some recent fixes -- plus
+new issues discovered by [Syzbot](https://syzkaller.appspot.com) -- which could
+be used to cause DDoS... but requiring root access on the local machine! -- and
+having to deal with tax-related admin tasks, forced me to move my focus
+elsewhere. Hopefully I can go back to this task very soon!
+
+Please note that I will be present at FOSDEM this weekend. There will be an
+[MPTCP Community
+meetup](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6750-mptcp-community-meetup-bof/)
+on Saturday at 17.30. Please join, so hopefully the room will have more than 2
+people there :-D
+
+In the longer term, quite a lot of work is planned to improve the situation in
+many different corner cases. A part of this work would require long
+uninterrupted sessions, which is hard to get when maintaining an active kernel
+subtree. But I hope to be able to split the work in a way that such sub-tasks
+can be interrupted by more urgent ones. I'm also looking at finding people to
+help me to realise these tasks quicker.
+
+## Team work
+
+As always, it is important to note that what I presented here so far is mostly
+what I was working on. But I'm not alone in this project. For example, Geliang
+continued to look at BPF `iter` for the subflows, and having a path-manage
+controlled with BPF ; Paolo helped fix some issues found by Syzbot, but also
+some improvements on the received path ; Mat helped with the code reviews ;
+Christoph continued to fix the SyzKaller infrastructure dedicated to MPTCP.
+
+A great community!