Robert Watson wrote:
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Hans Petter Selasky wrote:
I'm planning to create a new socket type in FreeBSD called AF_Q921,
which is to be used for ISDN telephony. Where do I find documentation
on how to implement a new socket in the kernel ?
[SNIP]
that isn't connected to the protocol stack, or by using a device stack
tied to Netgraph nodes. Could you tell us a bit more about what you're
trying to do, and perhaps we can provide some useful pointers? For
I want to jump in here about the netgraph stuff (this was the second
time a response talked about using netgraph).
While developing the ATM signaling stack (this is Q.2931) it turned out,
that the netgraph notion of sending message around very rapidly became a
nightmare if you want correct error handling. The number of states in
Q.2931 (12 states) and the API node exploded to something like 30 or 40
because of the asynchronuous nature of the communication between stack
layers and error handling. One example: To setup a connection you invoke
a SETUP request. Then you wait for something like CALL_PROCEEDING,
RELEASE_ACK or CONNECT_ACK. Unfortunately you also want to return an
error in the case something is wrong with the request itself (no memory,
bad parameters). So you add an extra message that just ACKs that the
SETUP is going to be handled by the stack or rejected because of some
error in it. With a normal function call based interface you would just
make the setup-request function return an error code. With netgraph
however you need to invent a new message, have additional states in the
consumer and the protocol. Not to talk about error handling when you
want to correctly handle errors like not beeing able to allocate that
same response message.
Netgraph is very nice for data-flow oriented stuff. It is not so useful
to stack complicated protocol layers. If I'd write the signaling stack
from scratch, I'd probably collaps all the signalling into a single
netgraph node with a socket interface on the upper end. But then one may
as well just implement that as a 'normal' protocol, probably...
harti
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