On Dec 10, 2011, at 5:11 AM, Sake Blok wrote:

> The task of libpcap is to capture frames and hand each frame to wireshark, no 
> dissection is done by libpcap, that is wiresharks job.

Deciding what a "frame" is for a particular capture, however, could be 
libpcap's job.  Whether those 16-byte frames constitute interesting frames from 
the point of view of the protocol is questionable; if they have no internal 
structure of their own, just "here's the next 16 bytes of data", I'd be 
inclined not to consider them interesting.

If the arrival timestamps of the frames are interesting, *then* it might be 
worth having libpcap treat the 16-byte frames as such.  Otherwise, that's not 
so clear.

That does raise the question of what happens if, for example, one trace 
message, less than 16 bytes long, is sent, and then another message that fills 
up a 16-byte frame is sent a significant amount of time later; does whatever's 
reading the trace truly not see the first trace message until the second trace 
message is sent?  If so, this sounds like something that isn't as useful as it 
could be if you're doing live tracing of an ARM-based system - especially if 
the trace messages don't themselves include time stamps, as in that case you 
have no idea when the event described by the first of those trace messages 
happened!
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