Date: Sun, 7 Sep 1997 16:30:19 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jamil J. Weatherbee" <jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org> To: Joerg Wunsch <joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, jamil@acromail.ml.org Subject: Speaking of device drivers. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970907161318.676A-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> In-Reply-To: <19970908004031.BO19348@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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I am currently working on a piece of software (actually an expansion of an earlier product), in house as a consultant for a small company. It involves the coordination of a horrendous number of sensors/actuators attached to a number of networked freebsd machines (actually 1 master server and 3 diskless freebsd machines which I have gone to the trouble of burning custom eproms for so they are truly diskless), anyway the Idea is that the sensors which are attached to the diskless client machines can be coordinated and controlled from the master server. I have started to build the foundations of a protocal suited (or so I hope) for making devices like these available on the network. What happens is when the diskless machines start up they send requests to the master server for a connection etc, and youv'e read, write, detachment, keepalives and protocols for one of the clients go down/ server goes down etc. Like I've said this is a work in progress but I think that the concept could be generalized a bit more to include the equivalent of nfs for character devices -- my authentication right now is by serial keys and device description shared by client and server. The original Idea comes from the need to have say a serial instrument of some type, like a force guage, connected to one of the diskless machines but controlled by the master server. Anyway my original idea was to be able to have Inter Kernel Communication links between kernels on a network of machines such as this to interconnect all of their devices so that the remote machines would have like /dev/slave/cuaa0 etc that could be locked and ioctled read, write, mmaped (from what I gather that would be the hard part) as if all machines were one --- a
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