On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 21:20 +0100, Paul McEnery wrote: <snip> > Hi Martin. > > Thanks for your input on this. I know there was a brief discussion on > the topic of a kernel vs user space tethering driver, and speed was > one of the topics. I recall a few claims being made about how much > faster kernel space is, but this was never substantiated, and there > was never a conclusion to the discussion. IIRC the user space driver > was something that didn't integrate with the other components such as > NetworkManager in quite the same way that ipheth does. Ipheth is just > another interface - which is why it fits in very nicely with NM.
Adding support for the user-space tethering service would be fairly straight-forward, Dan Williams and I already added support for Bluetooth that way. It ends up being better integrated into the applications, if there are things that cannot be exported via the kernel interfaces. > That said, ipheth is a tried and tested solution that appears to be > working well for many users [1]. > > Ben, one of the reasons that I was slow to respond to the call to > integrate ipheth into the mainline kernel is that I don't believe that > it belongs there. It's far too dependent on other bits and pieces in > order to function. It requires the user space usbmuxd daemon - and the > phone must be paired before it will function. You could say the exact same thing about things like Bluetooth support (BlueZ in-kernel and bluetoothd). You won't be able to make it work one bit without the user-space daemon. > It may well be easy to > add a utility for paring devices to the libimobiledevice-utils > package, but I'm not sure the solution becomes any more elegant. Then, > there is still the matter of what to do with the udev rules. I guess > it could be left to usbmuxd to pair any device which is connected, but > this has purposefully been left to each user space application to > handle appropriately. I'm not sure that all of this can (or should for > that matter) be elegantly put together. The pairing could also not be done automatically, and you'd document it for people that want to use the command-line, and integrate it in something like nautilus-ideviceinfo for others (add a checkbox about whether to enable tethering, and allow things like entering passcodes). > Given what ipheth is, and how it works, I feel that DKMS provides a > flexible and practical way of making it available to users. Despite my > view on it, I am sure there are differing opinions - and I would like > to hear them. DKMS isn't good enough to provide an integrated user-experience on distributions like Fedora (which only ship in-kernel modules, no out-of-tree drivers). If you're really not willing to get the driver upstream, then we'd probably end up shipping the user-space driver, and writing integration into NetworkManager for it. The best course of action, IMO, would be: - get ipheth into the kernel - add a command-line application to do the pairing - integrate a checkbox in nautilus-ideviceinfo to allow enabling/disabling the tethering support (so NetworkManager doesn't automatically connect to it when you're not interested in sharing the connection) Cheers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
