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

[Bruce M. Simpson]

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?

It's kind of a basic. [C]SLIP has been historically handy to have around 
for situations which warrant it. Mind you, given that we have had tun(4) 
in the tree for years now, a userland implementation of SLIP is possible.

As with all of these things it's down to someone sitting down and doing it.

I'm not volunteering to support any of this as I don't use it myself 
(got enough on my plate), merely pointing out that support for SLIP in a 
system is something many people have taken for granted over the years, 
and for prototyping something or providing IP over a simple serial link 
without the configuration overhead of PPP, SLIP is something someone 
might be using.

P.S. ahc(4) is commodity hardware, I think it can stay right where it is 
thank-you.