Hello all,
Hello all,
I thought I would just pass along my experiences with the new Speedtouch USB
driver thus far.
In general:
* Documentation: Umm... so what vpi.vci are we supposed to use? Do we need
to specify any IP addresses? I grabbed the vpi.vci from the windows driver but
it'd probably be good to put that in the README somewhere... especially for
those that don't even use windows at all.
Using PPPoE:
* Documentation: well, I realize this driver is brand new but it would have
been nice to know that to compile the bridging support one would need to
download and compile the ATM package rather than using the stock ATM headers and
such that are in the kernel. No biggie... got it all working after a bit of
playing. There should probably be a bit of a step-by-step on how to do this
though...
* Bridging: I couldn't get the configuration to work without assigning a
generic IP address to the nas0 bridging interface (also in the roaring penguin
setup you'll want to specify nas0 rather than an ethernet interface).
* Stability: on my configuration at least, this particular set up (the
Speedtouch USB driver at the bottom, then the RFC2684 bridging support, then
PPPoE, then PPP) was VERY unstable. I would get it to come up most of the time
but as soon as any data started streaming through, some part of this mess would
cause a kernel panic. Also, I could repeat this behavior by starting up a
couple of FTPs at the same time...
Using PPPoA:
* After a LOT of tweaking I finally got this to work. I used the same kernel
patches that I did for PPPoE (they seemed to work just fine) but had to compile
in support for synctty and asynctty, along with the various PPP compression
schemes. Also, I couldn't manage to get it to work when PPPoA was compiled into
the kernel rather than as a module.
* Stability: MUCH more stable than the PPPoE option but definitely a tougher
task to get it working.
* Performance: Using PPPoA definitely provided a significant improvement in
performance although neither one was just mind-boggling fast. Using PPPoE I
could typically achieve around 50 kB/s using FTP (before it would crash). Using
PPPoA I can typically get around 80 kB/s. This is compared to the 150-160 kB/s
I get through the windows driver. I'm not sure if this is the Alcatel driver
itself or the PPPoX layer but something needs to be looked at nonetheless.
During my streaming tests, the binary side of the Alcatel package was taking up
around 40% of my CPU so I would tend to think that if it something else weren't
restricting the speed of the transfer then it would use more cycles.
My configuration: Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop (366 MHz Celeron)
160 MB RAM, 10 GB HDD
RedHat 6.2, kernel 2.4.2 compiled using egcs 2.91.66
modutils-2.4.2
atm-0.78
sarlib-0.2.1
Roaring Penguin 2.8
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Thanks,
Robert Todd
Ph.D. Candidate
Chief UNIX System Administrator
HCS Research Laboratory
University of Florida
http://www-todd.hcs.ufl.edu
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