[Bcc to net and ipfw as relevant there -- if you want a reply to
go to the lists you need to add them explicitly.]
Hi,
as some of you have noticed, i am trying to fix some long-standing
problems that we have had with bridging and dummynet, so I'd like
to comment on what I am doing and how.
* i am working and doing testing on STABLE, as some of the problems
that we had in the past (races) were peculiar to that version,
at least until CURRENT uses Giant to protect critical sections.
I am testing/putting the code in CURRENT as well, but i believe
we can only have some significant testing on STABLE. So, you will
see some quick MFC -- please be tolerant. (The other reason for
this is that I do have a CURRENT box but it often dies in cpu_idle.
The same hw seems to be more robust when using a PicoBSD floppy
with STABLE, so i have no idea if it is bad hardware or what.)
* some of the problems peple are experiencing appear to be related
to memory corruption, which in turn derives from shared mbuf
clusters being modified at different places in the stack. The
approach i am following to track and fix them involves some changes
to the interfaces of ether_input(), bdg_forward(), and the firewall
check functions, so that these modules limit the amount of patching
into shared mbufs.
This means that some of the patches are rather extensive, and
affect several files namely:
net/if_ethersubr.c
net/bridge.[ch]
netinet/ip_dummynet.[ch]
netinet/ip_fw.[ch]
and to a much lesser degree
netinet/ip_input.c
netinet/ip_output.c
src/sbin/ipfw/ipfw.c
In some cases you will be required to update the userland
program, ipfw.
* check your system before reporting problems. While I can
make mistakes, I do check my code before committing. Most of the
"problems" reported recently were of the kind "cannot compile
the kernel", "ipfw says invalid command", and they were just
local error from people not updating the sources or header files
properly.
cheers
luigi
----------------------------------+-----------------------------------------
Luigi RIZZO, [EMAIL PROTECTED] . ACIRI/ICSI (on leave from Univ. di Pisa)
http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ . 1947 Center St, Berkeley CA 94704
Phone: (510) 666 2927
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