On Monday 14 January 2002 01:29 pm, Jean Tourrilhes wrote:
> Andrew Sutton wrote :
> > finally a non-configuration question ;)
>
>       Ah... Fun...
>
> > jean this is mainly directed to you,
> > but anybody else with input is welcome to respond.
>
>       Me ? Why ?

i understood you were the new maintainer and seem to be responsible for 
putting all the patches together :) besides, since dag left it seems that you 
are now the most knowledgable about the irda stack.

>       The only way to make the discovery/expiration quicker is to
> decrease the period of discovery. You can't discover/expire until you
> do the next discovery, which is every 3s.

we've fudged around with the timers and it yields some improvement - which is 
good, but we're still looking for a little more reactivity.

> > after some analysis, we've come to the conclusion that we essentially
> > need the equivilant of an event channel written into the af_irda layer.
> > in other words, we want a blocking call that will return a single event -
> > either discovery or expiry. unfortunately, this is kind of hard to
> > implement in the sockets API for a AF that already has a protocol
> > implementation.
>
>       Correct. What you want is to export the event through the
> netlink socket API. For example, you could use a RTnetlink
> event. That's what I've started to do for 802.11.
>

that sounds pretty interesting. is there any documentation online for this? 
besides the comments on your web page?

>
>       What works with select is the IrNET control channel.
>       If you preload (but don't use) the IrNET module on each
> device, you could do select+read on /dev/irnet and get your
> event. That would be the simplest solution. Just try it.

eww... that's kind of kludge :) using irnet to implement an irttp protocol. 
sounds like it will work though.

>
>       I've started to add Wireless Events for 802.11 card. It is
> just a specific sub-event on the RTnetlink channel. The patch is
> pretty simple and included on my web page :
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html#newapi
>
>       It would be pretty simple to use the same mechanism to add
> some IrDA events for discovery and expiry. You could even make then
> generic by transporting a bunch of struct sockaddr in the event. And
> you could also add other types of interesting events, such as socket
> creation and destruction.
>       Also, please take a *deep* look of what I did in IrNET. I
> spend time to create the right types of events that you need over IrDA
> with the right parameters (I went through several iterations).

that sounds pretty interesting. is the irnet stuff tied into the netlink 
sockets? i'm not going to be the one implementing - i'm just the point man so 
i'm trying to get as much info as possible.

as an afterthought: would there be any benefit moving the irda stack to use 
the new wireless drivers - since irda is primarily wireless protocol - or are 
they so different that it wouldn't make sense.

thanks,

andrew sutton
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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