Re: TCP Suite, and other networking.

[jsmith@red-branch.MIT.EDU writes:]

>The first of these being, utilizing VSTa as an embedded OS for routers.
>This of course requires a rather full Networking suite. My question is
>anyone already working on this? Or has just basic TCP stuff been worked
>on?

All we have is KA9Q. I have a /inet server mostly married with it, which
permits programs to open, say, /inet/tcp/25, and take the SMTP port for the
box.

>If there are people working on this I would be more than happy to
>coordinate things with them so that we do not duplicate any efforts.
>Stuff that I will be needing to support in the near future are the
>following: RIP, RIPII, SNMP, SNMPII, SLIP, CSLIP, PPP, HDLC, and a couple
>of protocols for ISDN work.

I don't know if the version of KA9Q I ported is up to the task. In any
case, it should provide some shortcuts for the port of some other networking
code.

>The second major project would be porting VSTa to some Alpha based
>computers that I have designed and built. Current OS work on them
>includes Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and HURD. Some of the machine models
>are indeed SMP machines. Has someone been working on multiprocessing
>primitives, or is that still at the stage of just 'holding' places for
>them in the code? Again I would prefer to coordinate things so that
>duplicated work is not done.

I have a dream that my annual bonus (coming out in a couple months) will be
big enough that I can "sneak in" the purchase of a dual processor Pentium
system. Until then, the only sanity checks which have been applied to the
SMP support is kernel preemption, and my experience doing SMP at Sequent.

>Somewhere down the line when I have the time, I am also interested in
>experimenting with VSTa as the core kernel for a MPP system. I also want
>to work with VSTa in a distributed environment.

This was the primary motivation behind getting /inet up and running. I
wanted to map VSTa messages over a box-to-box protocol, and thus be able to
access an arbitrary VSTa server from any other box. This would provide the
starting point for clustering.

                                                Regards,
                                                Andy
Received on Fri Aug 4 07:15:17 1995