Michael Richardson wrote:
Our hardware is actually not a network device at all, but registers as a char device and provides mmapped IO for performance reasons. Hence packets avoid kernel memory management and the Linux packet-socket for efficiency."Sean" == Sean Irvine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:Sean> We have pieces of hardware capable of monitoring various Sean> kinds of network links. This hardware is not configured Sean> as a network device (i.e. it is not ifconfig friendly), Sean> but we do have Linux drivers to talk to the hardware.I do not think that you need to be ifconfig'ed to talk to the packet capture mechanisms on Linux. Just go read netif_rx() and netif_receive_skb() in net/core/dev.c. So long as you can call with an skb, you are probably set. I'm not sure exactly what it means to be ifconfig-unfriendly - but as long as you can pretend to be a network device in some fashion, and produce SKB's, I think you should use the stock interfaces.
Preferably we'd like to be able to compile a single libpcap which could operate in Linux on both 'traditional' network devices and on our hardware transparently.
This would be better I think than having a pcap-XYZ implementation that operated only on our hardware and not regular interfaces, requiring the compilation of applications twice against different libpcap libraries on a single system.
Looking at libpcap, could we add some small state items to the end of "struct pcap_md", if they were suitably ifdef'd? The eventual goal is to contribute any changes made back upstream, so indications on what is and isn't likely to be accepted would be useful.
Stephen.
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Stephen Donnelly BCMS PhD email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Endace Technology Ltd phone: +64 7 839 0540
Hamilton, New Zealand cell: +64 21 1104378
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