network drivers and user interface

Thomas Sailer (sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch)
Fri, 14 Jun 1996 11:14:34 +0200 (MET DST)

- network device drivers in userland: is there a better way to feed
packets into/out of the kernel to a userland network driver than
converting the packets to SLIP and feeding them into a pty?
I have some DSP boards which could be used as ham radio modems easily
with a driver in userland...
- the other way round: is there an interface that allows me to get
every packet in raw form of a single network driver? I know the
SOCK_PACKET stuff, but there I get every packet of the specified type
from every interface, and I have to filter the packets myself, and this
will sure hurt performance if I'm only interested in a slow interface
whereas other interfaces are very active...
The cause of this question is that I wonder if I should convert the baycom
driver, which is currently a TTY driver, to a genuine net driver.
This would make it easier to use with kernel AX25, and the network driver
interface would be a saner solution than the tty hack, but there must be
a solution to use the driver with a userland AX25 stack, therefore I need
a method of getting the packets of this driver into userland...

Regards

Tom

--
Thomas (Tom) Sailer                    EMail: sailer@ife.ee.ethz.ch
Weinbergstrasse 76                     Ham Radio: hb9jnx @ hb9w.che.eu
CH-8408 Winterthur                     Phone: ++41 52 222 32 81