From owner-freebsd-net Sat Jan 30 13:44:05 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id NAA18787 for freebsd-net-outgoing; Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:44:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from whistle.com (s205m131.whistle.com [207.76.205.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA18774 for ; Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:44:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from archie@whistle.com) Received: (from smap@localhost) by whistle.com (8.7.5/8.6.12) id NAA09469; Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:43:30 -0800 (PST) Received: from bubba.whistle.com( 207.76.205.7) by whistle.com via smap (V2.0) id xma009465; Sat, 30 Jan 99 13:43:03 -0800 Received: (from archie@localhost) by bubba.whistle.com (8.8.7/8.6.12) id NAA10793; Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:43:03 -0800 (PST) From: Archie Cobbs Message-Id: <199901302143.NAA10793@bubba.whistle.com> Subject: Re: netgraph... In-Reply-To: from Richard Wackerbarth at "Jan 30, 99 02:14:11 pm" To: rkw@dataplex.net (Richard Wackerbarth) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:43:03 -0800 (PST) Cc: net@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL38 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Richard Wackerbarth writes: > Since we are all in (general) agreement that > 1: The node-node messages are in binary > 2: Only ngctl'ish programs need the ascii > 3: Their traffic is "low volume" > > may I suggest moving much of this burden into > (a library of) ngctl. > > Each node could be "read" to get the template > for its binary control messages. The "bloat" of > the actual parsing would be shifted to the parser > which remains in the ngctl program (library). > > And if we could implement that in the node by > "dumping" the contents of its ELF "message format" section. Well, we talked about that before (in private email) and came to the conclusion that anything requiring finagling with ELF sections was too complicated. Nobody prefers having ASCII parsing code in the kernel, but it's worth the tradeoff if it buys you the ability to keep the parsing code and the rest of the node type code together. However, if someday it becomes easy to do all of this: - Compile the encoding/decoding code into a separate ELF section - Have kldload() not load the extra ELF section (it probably already does this) - Have ngctl dynamically find and link in the type's ELF section containing the encode/decode routines Then it might be worthwhile.. I think #1 and #3 are hard though (or at least, rather complicated). -Archie ___________________________________________________________________________ Archie Cobbs * Whistle Communications, Inc. * http://www.whistle.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message