Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:37:10 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Archie Cobbs <archie@whistle.com> Cc: julian@whistle.com, net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: netgraph... Message-ID: <10974.917728630@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Jan 1999 11:44:54 PST." <199901301944.LAA10242@bubba.whistle.com>
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In message <199901301944.LAA10242@bubba.whistle.com>, Archie Cobbs writes: >Poul-Henning Kamp writes: >> >It's important that control message delivery between nodes be as >> >fast as possible >> >> I'm not talking about control messages between nodes, I'm talking >> ONLY about control messages between ME as root via the ngctl program >> to some specific node, to get it to do something or other. > >OK, that makes sense. I think I wasn't clear before and we're >actually saying more or less the same thing.. the main points being: > > o ngctl can take an ASCII command and deliver it as a control > message to a node, without knowing any specifics of that node > > o 'normal' node to node messages are still sent in binary form > > o no fancy ELF sections or anything Check! you got a deal mate! >Now, if you think it would be simpler to also have this control message: > > NGM_DELIVER_ASCII_CTRL_MSG - deliver a control message in ASCII form > >then I don't have a problem with that at all. My only point about it >is that.. > > - It's redundant, because you can do the same thing with a > NGM_ENCODE_CTRLMSG followed by sending the (binary) message Why pass it around twice ? > - Saving time is not important for ngctl (which mainly interacts > with humans). exactly, but this saves code complexity. > - You *still* would need NGM_ENCODE_CTRLMSG and NGM_DECODE_CTRLMSG > in order to (for example) print out debugging traces dumps, etc. I think we should look at the tcpdump model for this. >> Now I can write a ng module for something, distribute it in binary >> form only, and the users can still set option "water_pressure=4psi" >> or whatever they may need to set, without any hocus pocus with ELF >> sections and all that. > >Yes, being able to do this is *very* important I totally agree. And making it simple to understand for programmers is equally important, otherwise they tend to figure out all sorts of weird workarounds for stuff they don't understand... -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop." FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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