From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 6 16:00:58 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id QAA06714 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 6 Oct 1997 16:00:58 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers) Received: from coconut.itojun.org (root@coconut.itojun.org [210.160.95.97]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA06706 for ; Mon, 6 Oct 1997 16:00:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from itojun@itojun.org) From: itojun@itojun.org Received: from localhost (itojun@localhost.itojun.org [127.0.0.1]) by coconut.itojun.org (8.8.5/3.6Wbeta6) with ESMTP id IAA08052; Tue, 7 Oct 1997 08:00:31 +0900 (JST) To: Warner Losh cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: imp's message of Mon, 06 Oct 1997 11:27:59 CST. <199710061727.LAA14616@harmony.village.org> X-Template-Reply-To: itojun@itojun.org X-Template-Return-Receipt-To: itojun@itojun.org X-PGP-Fingerprint: F8 24 B4 2C 8C 98 57 FD 90 5F B4 60 79 54 16 E2 Subject: Re: IrDA Date: Tue, 07 Oct 1997 08:00:31 +0900 Message-ID: <8048.876178831@coconut.itojun.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >I'm looking at getting a portable Dell which claims to have IrDA. I >also just got a Halted catalog that has an ISA IrDA card from IBM. >Would I be nuts to expect these two things to talk to one another? Is >there anything magical about IrDA, or can I just run SLIP/PPP over >them like any other serial port? Also, if I'm running Win95, can I >run PPP over IrDA? If I read things, it is just a serial port, right? >The ISA IrDA card is for my FreeBSD box, so I'd need to know what >support is present there for IrDA. IrDA is made up from very huge amount of code. InfraRed serial port on your Dell can be understood as half-duplex serial line. The point is, if A sends bytestream while B is sending something, bytestream will be smashed. To make it look like a standard serial line, IrDA implements serial line emulation protocol over (connection oriented protocol over (packet based protocol over (half-duplex serial line))). serial line emulation protocol connection oriented protocol packet based protocol half-duplex serial line hardware We (colleagues and me) thought about how to implement this several times, but we felt amount of code > amount of benefit, so we haven't started. You can grab specifications as PDF files, from www.irda.org. itojun