HEAD UP: non-MPSAFE network drivers to be disabled (was: 8.0 network stack MPsafety goals (fwd))

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 26 May 2008, Ade Lovett wrote:

> On May 25, 2008, at 02:58 , Robert Watson wrote:
>
>> While I'd be quite supportive of something along these lines, I think it 
>> probably is more work to port SLIP to userspace than to hack the current 
>> code a little bit to be MPSAFE, assuming it remains supported with the 
>> revised tty code.  SLIP is a fairly straight-forward piece of code, as long 
>> as you don't try to understand the line discipline stuff. :-)
>
> Given that this is (a) 2008 and (b) 8.x we're talking about, are there 
> really that many consumers of SLIP to warrant it being carried forward at 
> all?
>
> Seems to me that it would not be unreasonable to give a heads up that the 
> current kernel-space ppp/slip (and, for that matter, plip) drivers are going 
> away some time before 8.0-RELEASE, pppd is more than adequately replaced by 
> userland-ppp or netgraph, and if there's some critical need by someone to 
> have SLIP and/or PLIP, then they'll need to step up to the plate to do the 
> necessary re-implementation.

The thread you're replying began with precisely such a heads up. :-)

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge