> (Just in case this cross-post is bad net ettiquette, I apologize in
> advance. If its bad behavior please let the -owner of the list tell me)
The proper list is linux-ppp@vger.rutgers.edu.
> I have an old slackware distribution which came with PPP version 1.3.
> The Kernel I'm running is version 1.1.95. Everything works fine on the
> system but I thought I'd try out the latest kernel version 1.3.30.
That is a very big jump. I am sure that you will find more things than just
PPP will be out of date. Get updates to the net-tools as well as the
Net-Kit package.
(If I was doing this, I would probably back up the files which are mine;
and get a current copy of Slackware or RedHat. Load that. It will contain
the updates to the needed files.)
> I
> compiled the kernel and it seems to work just fine (for now I'm testing
> by booting from floppy). However, I believe I need to upgrade the ppp
> on my system to work with the new kernel as 1.3 may not be compatible.
> Can someone confirm this? What version is recommended with this kernel?
> (Is 1.3.30 stable?)
The current code is always on sunsite.unc.edu in the directory
/pub/Linux/system/Network/serial.
I just put the 2.2 code for pppd there. You may wish to use that version.
That version has a couple of problems which have yet to be corrected in a
couple of weeks.
1. DON'T run pppstats if you have a 386 without a 387 AND you are
using BSD compression. There is a floating point divide in the kernel
code which is called at the time that pppstats wants to get the BSD
compression statistics. This will cause the kernel to panic.
The fix for this is not simple to describe here. You will just have to
wait for the correction.
2. In some places I fail to reset the tty write-callback flag bit. The
offending instructions read:
tty->flags &= ~TTY_DO_WRITE_WAKEUP
and they should say:
tty->flags &= ~(1 << TTY_DO_WRITE_WAKEUP)
> Could you also recommend binutils versions and perhaps gcc upgrade? Is
> ELF-GCC recommended? Thanks for your help.
I would suggest that you upgrade to one of the two ELF distributions. Since
you are going to be replacing a large portion of the code base, you would
probably not want to do this often.
> Would upgrading any of the above break existing programs? What about
> ELF-GCC compiled programs/kernel image?
The 1.3 kernel has an option for both supporing the ELF code as well as
using ELF when you build the kernel. The 1.2 kernel must be patched to
support 'building the kernel using ELF'.
-- Al Longyear longyear@netcom.com Finger for PGP key