What's Going On At InterWorking Labs (IWL)
October 7, 2026
It has been a busy year!!
IWL is focusing on KMAX
The memory shortage has become more than merely annoying - we have been unable to obtain many of the parts we need to construct our products, particularly DRAM and SSDs. And the uncertainty of international trade - such as tariffs - has made it difficult (or impossible) for us to obtain some platforms.
This has forced us to move to new platforms and obsolete some old ones. We've updated our product list - https://iwl.com/products/kmax-product-list
Thunderbolt-Attached Network Interfaces - An Experiment
We are experimenting with a new approach to network interfaces: In our lab, we have a few KMAX units on which we are using Thunderbolt 4 (or newer) ports to drive external network interfaces. So far this is working well, but with a few annoying issues. We are using both 1Gbit RJ45 and SFP+ 10Gbit external network interfaces.
Thunderbolt is fast - it can carry 40gigabits/second to and from the external network interface. That gives us plenty of performance headroom, even when we are using the same Thunderbolt port for multiple network interfaces and even a DisplayPort feed to a monitor.
The annoying part is that because Thunderbolt is a plug-in technology, our underlying operating system (FreeBSD) may rename the interfaces when they are plugged in, so right now we are looking at a requirement that Thunderbolt-attached network interfaces be pre-attached before boot time.
Support for network interfaces via Thunderbolt will open the door to a much broader range of underlying platforms. But that won't happen soon, so don't hold your breath.
KMAX and Virtual Machines - A Matter of Accuracy and Stability
We have experimented with KMAX on hypervisors such as VMWare/Broadcom's Esxi and Linux (KVM/QEMU).
We do not recommend running KMAX on a virtual machine hypervisor.
Why?
It is not that they do not work - they do (although the setup may be a bit complicated).
Rather, we have serious concerns about the accuracy of KMAX on a virtual machine. Most users put several competing VMs onto a hardware platform that may already be burdened with other competing work. This creates contention for CPU, memory, and network resources. When one tunes a VM to provide KMAX with nailed-down resources, we've found that we are essentially taking over the underlying machine, thus frustrating the users of those other VMs (and still not getting the level of accuracy we are used to getting on dedicated hardware).
Over the years, we have developed a Linux-based, in-house test tool (we call it C-Clamp) to measure the accuracy and stability of KMAX. On dedicated hardware, we have found KMAX to be quite accurate (far better than millisecond accuracy) and without much wobble around desired time settings (in other words, a small standard deviation with few, if any, outlying events).
(We have also used test gear from companies such as Spirent and Ixia/Keysight to measure KMAX. However, that gear is often designed to generate heavy loads rather than measure accuracy and stability. So we have found our C-Clamp to be better for our self-test purposes.)
We have also discovered that in some large organizations, the technical administrators of the company's internal resources have centralized the hardware hosts for virtual machines. Often those hardware hosts end up physically distant from the KMAX users. (In one case, that distance was transcontinental!) That tends to make KMAX appear inaccurate because of the need for the user's test traffic to pass over long, busy, shared network links, thus introducing uncontrolled and unknown levels of latency/jitter, packet loss, and rate restrictions (among other things).
New Website
Our old website was getting cumbersome, and for some reason the provider (Squarespace) still does not support access via IPv6.
So we've brought the website back in-house and re-designed it on the Grav content management system. It will take us a while to bring over some of the older blog entries.
This new website is much easier for us to maintain and, for users, it feels much faster.
Maxwell Pro and Silvercreek are now at Seguesoft
Maxwell Pro and SilverCreek are now sourced by Seguesoft: https://seguesoft.com/
Seguesoft is run by the same friendly and skilled hands who have long handled Maxwell Pro and Silvercreek. IWL and Seguesoft are closely cooperating to make this transition a smooth one for customers (and for us.)
- SilverCreek at: https://seguesoft.com/silvercreek/
- Maxwell Pro at: https://seguesoft.com/maxwell-pro/
