Re: Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support
Hi all,
This has been a fun post to read!
First off, it's good to remember that Iain is suggesting something for discussion, and that things won't happen without a general consensus from everyone who cares. Debian-hams doesn't have a shadowy steering committee who want to take toys away from the wider community, and no one individual can do that either. If enough people contribute to the discussion, then the way forward is clear.
I have been a little annoyed at ax25 in the kernel for a long old time - I really want to play more with ip over ax25, but the silent packet repeating issue has meant performance has been slow and it's tough to convince others to join me.
Others have noticed this too - it's been a discussion for a long time on the uronode mailing list, I seem to remember. N1URO forwarded on the attached patch from Marius YO2LOJ with the following blurb:
"As you've read on the URONode list, there's issues since kernel 4.x
series in regards to the ax.25 protocol stack that no one appears to
wish to fix. The system falsely reports frames via axip/axudp being
transmitted but no frames ever do. Marius YO2LOJ from the URONode dev
team provided a patch for the ax25 kernel module which I'm attaching.
Please test and patch at will. It's pretty scary from a political point
of view as to why upstream kernel maintainers insist on rejecting
patching their faulty kernels... never mind from a technical point of
view. I'm sure downstreams would wish their distributions to be more
functional and less error prone."
Perhaps there's a starting point in looking at what that patch fixes, and then working with upstreams to get it in the kernel? This has also been sent to the Fedora maintainers but I've not seen whether it's been included or not.
I'm not sure about the politics of the situation, {and have no desire for involvement} but it seems like they've had issues getting responses from upstream.
As I've drifted away from the hobby and the like for a little while, I've not got a station set up to play with this properly, but can maybe set something up as a testbed. I recovered some of my gear from storage last night.
Sadly I don't think I've got the skills to write a userspace driver from scratch, or contribute in a meaningful way to the existing kernel code, but I'm happy to rebuild kernels and test things!
Attachment:
ax25-4.9-patched.tgz
Description: application/compressed
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