[openbeosnetteam] Re: porting FreeBSD's new netstack
- From: Waldemar Kornewald <Waldemar.Kornewald@xxxxxx>
- To: openbeosnetteam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:00:58 +0200
Axel Dörfler wrote:
Why writing our own then? Why not just moving the ported stack over to
exactly match our needs? And I don't mean a nice C++ API here, because
that thing just sits in the kernel anyway :)
That is a nice question. :)
The real question was: should we take our current port and fix it or
should we make a new port which does not need fixing? But we have plans
for a new netstack...
Personally, I could live with a port, but I would also like to have a
netstack that is readable (source) and uses some cool new technologies
(general layer interface, attributes, no-locking concept? [as far as
possible]). Maybe we can reduce the code size and make it significantly
more readable. We already agreed on C (I do not always need C++ ;) and
you can find the code in our src/tests/kits/net/newstack folder.
FreeBSD's stack already has most features we need, except for mDNS&DHCP
kernel modules (maybe). Hey, their stack even has an NDIS wrapper!
Our netstack could be more integrated, but maybe we would not even
notice the difference. And I doubt that the stack will actually be fast
enough to compete with BSD's one. The attribute system means some (not
much) lookup overhead, but it makes the source clearer and it can
sometimes remove the code for distinguishing between different protocol
types (TCP over IPv4&6, anything over ethernet&802.2/3, etc.) because
the layout of the packet is translated to attributes.
What do you think? How much work would a new port (we can reuse
existing
code and experience) and fixing/extending the current port mean?
Dunno - that depends on how far you left David's work on making our
stack thread-safe behind. Because that was pretty unusable.
I saw nearly no locking at all in the ported stuff. Maybe TCP is safe,
but it will be very complicated to find all the places in our core
module where locking is needed and we will have to take care of
dead-locks. This will be a major undertaking.
Bye,
Waldemar
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