Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:07:56 GMT From: jbg@masterplan.org (Jason George) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: IrDA? PnP? Message-ID: <199904140305.VAA10623@gongshow.masterplan.org>
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Justin Walker wrote: > I don't have much to add to the discussion, but FYI, you can find >info at www.irda.org. For reasons that escape me, the good folks >working on this elected to duplicate most of the IP functionality >(media layer, network layer, a couple of transports, name resolution, >....) rather than treat the IrDA as a media type (as done, e.g., with >IRtalk by Apple some time back). Therefore, you get all the >benefits of IP over, say, ATM; that is, a lot of wasted cycles to get >your bits flowing. One man's opinion, of course :-} > I second that opinion! I smashed my head into a bloody pulp with this 3.5 years ago when I worked for a large nameless Canadian telecom equipment vendor. (The same vendor that merged/bought Bay Networks...) The counselling to get me over that period was going so well until this setback! :-) I had to implement basic IrDA on a microcontroller with serious RAM, ROM, and real-time constraints. It was supposed to be a proof-of-concept IrDA-enabled telset. Ultimately, the infrared phone worked, only after I invented a piece-of-crap basic protocol that was actually feasible to implement, given what that teensy microcontroller had left to offer. Thanks to the original poster for bringing up IrDA. It was enough to push me to take the binder on my shelf containing the Link Access and Link Management Protocol documents and to dump the contents in the recycle bin! On a serious note, I would suggest that it might be easier to simply port the Linux code. I haven't kept up with the progression of IrDA in the last few years, but I know that in the days of the original 1.0 (and pre-1.0) specs , there was a sample implementation of the state machines and some little demo apps available from an IBM ftp site. At least 1 company had $$$ source available for multiple target platforms back in '95. It might be an idea to investigate who has this available now and make an "open source" argument to them... Hope this helps... --Jason j.b.george<at>ieee.org jbg<at>masterplan.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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