FreeLists / openbeosnetteam / [openbeosnetteam] Re: Status

[Philippe Houdoin <philippe.houdoin@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Oliver,
> 5.) Several people have expressed their dislike of sysctl() as means to
> control the net stack. Although the FreeBSD stack exports lots of different
> SYSCTL nodes and values, I suppose it shouldn't be too much work to avoid
> using sysctl, as only three tools are currently using it: arp, route and
> show (whatever the latter is). So in order to avoid using sysctl, we should
> discuss how to replace it (ioctl on /dev/net/stack perhaps?) and then patch
> these tools to use that new solution instead of sysctl.

In fact, the current sysctl() implementation already use an ioctl on
/dev/net/stack (NET_STACK_SYSCTL opcode) to pass down the stack sysctl() data.
What many dislike about sysctl() is its structure-packed interface, I think.
Combined with very criptic field names and constants make using such mecanism an
hard task for non-stack gurus. But we need a generic and evolutive way to query
and control (and eventually [un]subscribe to events) stack behavior now and
tomorrow, no doubt.

> 0.) We should import the FreeBSD stack. I'm not very familiar with svn, so I
> am not sure how to do this properly. What about doing this?
>       - import the FreeBSD-6.1-release netstack into a vendor branch
>       - create a new netstack branch of module haiku under team/network
>       - copy files from the vendor branch into the netstack branch as
>         seems appropriate/necessary
>       - start work in the network branch, very likely dragging more files
>         from the vendor branch along

Sounds good steps.
We already have a branch for this project under
branches/team/network/freebsd_stack.

- Philippe