From owner-freebsd-net Tue Apr 4 7:56: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from obie.softweyr.com (obie.softweyr.com [204.68.178.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C31437BA5D for ; Tue, 4 Apr 2000 07:55:58 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from softweyr.com (Foolstrustidentd@obie.softweyr.com [204.68.178.33]) by obie.softweyr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA15809; Tue, 4 Apr 2000 08:55:40 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Message-ID: <38EA0277.42E7B788@softweyr.com> Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 08:55:51 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson Cc: Arun Sharma , freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: kernel vs user level implementation of NAT References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Robert Watson wrote: > > Keeping code in userland makes it *substantially* easier to develop, > debug, and maintain. It also makes the code far more portable, and > avoids adding more baggage to the in-kernel IP stack, which would reduce > our ability to modify the stack to reflect changing needs. > > I understand that the BSD/OS folks have extended BPF to allow it to modify > packets on the fly, as well as do other spiffy things, which provides a > nice stack expensibility mechanism while reducing the kernel/userland > switches. It may be that as the BSD/OS+FreeBSD code bases draw closer > together, we get to see more spiffy features such as that in the public > FreeBSD source base. You could also perform many of these tasks now with netgraph nodes in FreeBSD, allowing you to load modules for the specific processing task you have and attach them to specific stream(s) easily. This does not offer the ease of development and maintenance that user-mode daemons do. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message