Hello.
Reading the list messages about networking support in ELKS,
I remembered reading about that older computers didn't have enough
memory to handle the TCP/IP stack. (And we do want TCP/IP, don't we?)
So, before continuing the discussion about "Which network card should be
supported first", perhaps we should solve the problem with handling the
connections and packet streams under extreme memory (& cpu) limitations.
I haven't done much network programming, so I can't really say I know
what I'm talking about. %) But I still want to share some of my
thoughts on optimization for the sake of the debate. -Please forgive my
ignorance...
-Imho, the types of services should be as limited as possible.
(Surprised?? :)
-We could probably building (some of) the layers together to do
optimization.
-As much of the network functions as possible (and probably a lot) could
be
built in the manner that modems connect to ur ISP under Linux, for
instance.
With settings of "Expect"s and "Send"s. (and if-then's)
-Where the memory limitation is a bigger obsticle than the cpu
performance, we could use a fast compression algoritm to compress all
the packets in-memory.
-Assuming that there is some kind of disk device connected to the
computer,
packets in a chain could be swapped to disk (copied to disk,
"just-in-case"), making it possible to handle packet chains to big to
fit in memory.
--Tobias Ekbom.
PS.
Has anyone written a GUI (X or not) that runs under ELKS?
I have a *tiny* VGA16 GUI function set with bitmapped fonts, written in
assembler for the 80186. (Part of an OS project called "Mooph OS" that I
had a year ago) -I am thinking about porting it for 8086 Linux, but
surely there must be better projects to waste my time with. If there's
any GUI at all for the ELKS, I'd like to know more about it. Please :)
