Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 02:16:02 +0200 (MET DST) From: Mikael Karpberg <karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se> To: julian@whistle.com (Julian Elischer) Cc: sos@FreeBSD.org, wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de, phk@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: ISDN code removal, final warning. Message-ID: <199610210016.CAA11690@ocean.campus.luth.se> In-Reply-To: <326A83CA.167EB0E7@whistle.com> from Julian Elischer at "Oct 20, 96 12:55:55 pm"
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According to Julian Elischer: > > As an ISDN user I have the same reservations as Poul-Henning, I'm > > not sure ISDN belongs in the kernel... > > > Oh I think it does, and I expect to be asked to start working on it > soonish. How about this? It doesn't belong there. Neither does IP, or most drivers. IMHO. It seems to me Linux is going the right way, trying to split up their kernel, making it more modular, having it load stuff like drivers as it is needed. Or am I missinformed? (Could very well be the case here...) Streams should be wonderful, no? So you could just plug a new protocol in, and run it over any connection, and plug a new communication hardware in, and write a driver to just handle that, without worring about protocol. Plug it in and run any protocol supported allready. I have no idea what kind of efforts are going on to get streams in, or make the kernel dynamically load device drivers, or such... Is there an effort? Is it something that FreeBSD as a community wants? Should be... easier for people to contribute if they just have to figure out how to make a connection from hardware to an API, rather then having to know half the kernel, and go messing about in it to get things to work. I don't know how much of which case we have today, I'm affraid. A friend and I pondered writing an NDIS 3.1 API, in form of a network driver, which would load drivers from /drv/ndis/ or something. That way, we could get INSTANT support for the cutting edge network hardware that comes out, since it WILL come with an NDIS driver to support win95. Just "mcopy a:thefile.drv /drv/ndis/" (possibly with a command like "newndis thefile.drv" to initialize it's use) and reboot the system, and you can try the thing while it's still so hot out of the development, you'll burn yourself touching it. And to be able to do it in your favourite OS, instead of win95! :) In adition to that, there are, we found, quite a few fun things out there... Like a ppp-driver which uses ndis, from Micro$oft. I don't know how it worked really, but possibly you could just plug it in like any network ndis driver, and use it like it was any network card. I found it interesting. Also making NDIS support a network driver would allow you to compile with or without it as you pleased. If it's possible. Then your card would just show up as ndis0, ndis1, etc, regardless of it's a ppp driver for modem, or an ethernet card, or whatever. Hmm... We haven't seriously researched this, so I could be completely wrong. I just thought I'd share some ideas, see if anyone was working on any of them, and/or found inspiration in them. Maybe someone just have a comment that could be useful, if not for me, then maybe for someone else. So... comments? :) *duck* /Mikael
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