Re: [patch] drivers/net/plip.c

Tommy Thorn (Tommy.Thorn@irisa.fr)
Thu, 4 Feb 1999 01:50:36 +0100 (MET)


Alan wrote:
> The PLIP protocol is frozen. Fixed in time. Its tied to PC parallel port
> bogosities, DOS drivers, other legacy stuff

I meant what I meant was that nothing should stop us from added a
different protocol. The name could even be changed if that's an issue.
A DMA capable, 8 bit PLIP-like would be much nicer, but the lack of a
standard cable might be a show stopper.

....
> The overhead on plip being ethernet compatible is basically nil. Its probably
> lower than PPP once you've considered alignment and header decode issues.

Ok, I stand corrected.

Alexander Viro wrote:
> Sync-on-intr would be much nicer, but no such luck. And we can't
> change the protocol - compatibility hits and all such. We could
> implement the second protocol and that would be the Right Thing, but
> that's another story. </rant>

Interrupt for each byte? ~50 kHz interrupts would require a pretty
low latency, or am I missing your point?

> Erm... IIRC PLIP used in 1.0 was canned exactly because of
> incompatibility with original protocol. Maybe we should follow 386BSD here
> and allow several protocols selected by ioctl() (from ifconfig). Maybe we
> might even add negotiation there.

Definitely negotiation/autodetection.

/Tommy

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