Re: modems should work now (who was going to work on ppp?)
Hi,
I hate do write this mail, because I have to discourage someone who actually
sat down and made some code!
On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 06:24:49PM -0700, Steve Bowman wrote:
> Well, I'm not sure about volunteering to take the lead on this, but I
> have started working on it. It's going to take awhile so be patient.
> I may come back to the list a few times for questions/guidance.
Maybe it gets faster when we cooperate, and settle on a common approach.
> So far, I've got the ppp network interface device mostly wired into
> gnumach (slip, too). I've got a few critical pieces ifdef'd out so I
> can see if I've got the build flags and dependencies mostly worked out
> which I do. The resulting kernel boots. I'll have to look more at the
> critical pieces to see what's needed to make them work. The pieces
> already done are mostly just scavenged from linux[1]. The critical
> pieces ifdef'd out need to be wired into mach/hurd and have to do with
> process management and ttys.
That's why this approach doesn't work. I spend a couple of hours in the
various PPP codes available, and decided that this will not lead to
something. You could also put this code in pfinet, btw.
The problem is that the linux kernel module relies on the line discipline to
talk to the modem. We simply don't have this. (And my efforts to port this
can be seen in the contrib/marcus/gnumach-char directory on
alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd. In other words, I couldn't get it to work).
> All of this is just the first step, there's still the porting of the
> ppp daemon itself which I've also started[2], then stopped pending
> gnumach support.
I think that we agreed on using the BSD ppp user space implementation (or
better, a port of). Roland suggested mpd, but it uses netgraph, about which
I know nothing.
> [2] started with ppp 2.4.0f before I started working on gnumach.
> The linux code put into gnumach looks like about vintage 2.3.7 IIRC so
> I'm going to restart this with the 2.3.11 ppp source available in potato.
> Most of the work will be writing a pppd/sys-gnu.c file. I have no idea
> how much of sys-linux.c can be used.
That's the other side of the story. sys-gnu.c and the work in gnumach will
be needed in addition to the almost impossible gnumach work you mentioned.
But something like sys-gnu (actually less) is needed for ppp, so with this
in mind you have the idea why user space ppp is much less work.
This was all discussed awhile ago on this list in various threads, and
several people made summaries.
Thanks,
Marcus
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