> Thanks for your comments. It would be wonderful to use STP
> as the underlying protocol with a FLIP addressing scheme rather
> than INET. FLIP was originally designed for Amoeba which uses
> cryptographically secure ports for naming and communication end-points
> by the RPC layer above FLIP. This is described briefly in Tanenbaum's
> book on "Distributed Operating Systems". Since STP uses ports on the NIC's
> for communication one needs a mapping between MAC addresses and STP ports.
Note that those are STP ports on a particular NIC. So the address
space from a host point of view is mac_addr+stp_port. Of course the
mac_addr is determined by the NIC that is used to make the connection.
> FLIP would then need to map its addresses to STP ports instead of INET
> addresses
> which isn't a problem. This mapping would need to be dynamic to provide the
> necessary location transparency for distributed systems. This sounds really
> cool to me.
> Unfortunately, a quick glance over your code was tough going because it is
> interwined
> with regular INET4 linux code. I started from scratch for FLIP and don't call
> any INET
> routines currently. But I haven't got that far either :-)
Sorry about that; infact the intent IS to make the stp code totally
upper layer protocol clean! but since INET is the only upper layer
protocol in this release its isn't very so; will start happening as
we start supporting scsi over STP (or your work could be the
reason :-)
In terms of reading the code - in the core directory, any filename
which is stp*inet* named, consider it to be part of the INET upper
layer; rest of the code is mostly stp clean - except for back calls
to the inet upper layer which will have to be abstracted out into
a data structure some time.
> Keep in touch.
> By the way I develop kernel code on a 21264 alpha system so it is 64 bit
> clean hopefully.
Have been playing with this only on IA32 so far.. but would
be very interested an responsive to 64 bit bugs (and fixes :-)
:a
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