Userspace PPP a la FreeBSD?

[Adam Sampson <azz@gnu.org>]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 12:13:30AM +0100, Chris Lingard wrote:
> PS
> Please send pppd

On an alternate tack for getting Hurd a PPP implementation, how about
implementing a workalike of FreeBSD's "tun" driver and nicking their
userspace ppp daemon? From the tun(4) manpage:

     The tun interface is a software loopback mechanism that can be loosely
     described as the network interface analog of the pty(4), that is, tun
     does for network interfaces what the pty driver does for terminals.
...
     The network interfaces are named tun0, tun1, etc, as many as were made
     by MAKEDEV(8).  Each one supports the usual network-interface
     ioctl(2)s, such as SIOCSIFADDR and SIOCSIFNETMASK, and thus can be used
     with ifconfig(8) like any other interface.
...
     Once the interface is ready, read() will re- turn a packet if one is
     available; if not, it will either block until one is or return
     EWOULDBLOCK, depending on whether non-blocking I/O has been enabled.
...
     A write(2) call passes a packet in to be `received'' on the
     pseudo-interface.  Each write() call supplies exactly one packet; the
     packet length is taken from the amount of data provided to write().

It looks like this would be a much easier job to implement than PPP as a
Hurd server.

-- 

Adam Sampson
azz@gnu.org