Re: PPP

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 12:32:01AM -0500, Daniel E. Baumann wrote:
> Hello all as I hope some of you know I am attempting to get PPP to work for
> the HURD.

Great. I was already giving up waiting and started to take a look myself
yesterday. There's a lot of work to be done.

> As of right now I am still trying to figure out some of the HURD
> internals, Mach and all how it all works. I am making some progress and I
> am writing a Programming HOWTO. I heard that there was a patch
> for pfinet to allow it to have multiple interfaces so my question is where is
> it?

I posted one to the list yesterday. The old patch was about getting routing
information. I will put it at alpha later.

> Is it usable and if so is there a reason why it is not in CVS?

Because Thomas didn't investigated if it is a good one. Also, it might be
a problem to reach the author for the copyright assignment.
I don't know if it applies cleanly, btw, and I think Thomas wanted to do
some chanegs on the interface, too (pfinet.defs)

> If it is
> not usable (or I am mistaken and something like this does not exist) then is
> it true that whoever does implement PPP will have to help rewrite pfinet?

No, a rewrite is not necessary, but an extension. The task is to get a
tunnel interface in pfinet by having pfinet translate /dev/tun0 as well.
This requires adding a portclass, implementing trivfs stubs for this (select
will be a bit hard), and porting ppp to this interface.

> I
> still have two more months to devote to it (I do have some other classes
> though, but they are HSS classes, not much hacking going on there :P ). I
> hope at the very least I can help get pfinet rewritten then the porting of
> some user space utilities (BSD ppp or whatever) would be the next logical
> step, right? Anyway I really need some feedback from you guys (I thought my
> last post made it to the list, but no one responded).

You should make yourself familiar with libtrivfs and pfinet first.
 
> Also after going back through and rereading some messages I have saved I
> realize that libstore is a good place to look for implementation ides for the
> new pfinet. I guess once I fell confident enough I'll start there.

Well, if you want to go for the real ideal solutiopn to the problem (the
channel abstraction explained by Roland), then libstore is the analogy. But
there is nothing that libstore has to do with this apart from being a good
analogy, so libstore will tell you a lot about the Hurd, but nothing about
pfinet or ppp.

Thanks,
Marcus

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