Hi,
OK, my latest patches got into 2.3.24. This means however that most of the
device drivers are, or may be broken. The good thing is that the new design
is much better, and much more flexible than the previous. There is also a
good chance that I will develop driver for the NSC '338 and try to fix the
SMC IrCC driver in the next couple of weeks. This work is very important
for the future of Linux-IrDA, so I will just have to prioritize it.
What we still need to fix before 2.4:
o The IAS interface needs to be fixed a bit to avoid some dangerous
behavior. If the query answer arrives after the client has been closed,
then the machine may freeze. This can be sometimes be observed when using
IrLAN, IrCOMM or the sockets interface. The machine freezes if you kill
the process while the kernel is doing an IAS query.
o Sockets API need some cleanup. Need to differ between STREAM and SEQPACK
services, and only allow max_sdu_size=0 when using a STREAM service, and
also only allow max_sdu_size>0 when using a SEQPACK service. We should
also make it more similar to the IrDA interface in WinSock.
o IrLAN cannot create netdevices dynamically anymore. We will have to
pre-allocate them when the module is inserted. The reason is that
such allocation cannot be done from interrupt context, and without
irmanager cannot get any process context for doing this. IrLAN will
have to be redesigned a bit.
If you have suggestions for other _important_ changes, then please mail
me.
So my goal for Linux-IrDA in Linux-2.4 is to have support for both the NSC
'338 and SMC IrCC chipsets. Since we already have support for the Toshoboe
chipset, this should give us 4Mbps support for over 95% of all the laptops
that are sold today. Stable IrLAN and IrCOMM services, and a sockets
interface that is usable enough for companies to consider porting their
IrDA applications to Linux. IrOBEX is a bit messy right now, but the
development speed is actually very high. So eventually we will have a much
better and stable OBEX with GUI's etc. I'm actually working on a new Python
impl. of OBEX that will run on most platforms including Linux, Win32,
WinCE, *BSD (over TCP only) Psion? etc. This code is almost working now,
but will probably not be released for a couple of months since it's tightly
coupled to a research project I'm doing.
If we manage to fix the issues I have listed above, then we should have a
very good and stable IrDA service that doesn't need any help from
user-space in order to work. You should be able to use IrDA (IrLAN) in a
booting kernel, which might actually be very interesting for PDA's and
HPC's (I just got Linux booting on my HP Jornada 680!)
I will send a large patch to Alan later tonight which will fix most device
drivers, so you should probably wait with the testing of the newer
kernels. I'll mail you when I think it's safe.
Linux-IrDA would have been nothing without all the testers. So keep up the
good work!!
-- Dag
--
/ Dag Brattli | The Linux-IrDA Project /
// University of Tromsoe, Norway | Infrared communication for Linux //
/// http://www.cs.uit.no/~dagb | http://www.cs.uit.no/linux-irda/ ///
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