Martin wrote:
> > >Another point that comes to mind here: it has been proposed to treat
> > >ISDN just as another link level network interface, create a socket address
> > >variant carying ISDN phone no's and use the full socket interface as the
> > >API of choice. This would fit nicely here...
> 
> And Jonathan said:
> > Yes. What I don't understand is, why anyone would do anything *else* :).
> [..]
> > as there a conflict between ISDN, and the ppp code requiring that the
> > lower-level device implement the tty software interface?  That would
> > explain a lot.
> 
> No, not realy. That's why Paul separated if_ppp.c from ppp_tty.c.
> Currently BISDN has no working tty support, but does ppp quite well.
> 
> I don't think the choice is that obvious: it's a one size doesn't fit
> all kind of think (in german an "eierlegende Wollmilchsau"), as a user
> you don't realy do anything with the device, your abstraction will be
> the ISDN connection - coming in different shapes: network connection via
> HDLC or PPP, character device in tty emulation, aplication specific when
> doing speech or video or whatever special service you use. But as you
> explained before, you do care about the card for things like downloading
> code to it, hot-swapping it, ... 
> 
> Does the upcoming pcmcia code require something special for card to be
> swappable? Does it need to have a character device attached?
> 
> Another way to integrate ISDN into the kernel would be the ISDN-bus: you
> have an ISDN-controller attaching one ISDN-bus (as an abstraction for your
> basic rate interface) and different devices attached to that bus modeling
> the available services: a networking device, a tty device, a sound device
> and others. You open a device and get a connection via that service or,
> in the networking case, you ifconfig the device up and get a connection (or
> a possible connection, as you would probably do dial-on-demand)

Take a look at what Gordon Ross did with the 8530 driver. It's broken
up into a zsc, the Zilog Serial port Chip, and various slaves, like
zstty, which is the tty driver, and a kbd and ms (mouse) drivers for
the sun3. It's not (yet) quite what you describe as either a tty or
kbd or ms attaches at boot. The whole thing I'm fumbling at doing is
adding an hdlc child, which would attach along side the zstty child.
If you want character sent out the port, you open the zstty. If you
want to do hdlc, you open the hdlc system.

> But would autoconfig allow you to attach one bus to multiple bus-controllers
> (if you have multiple ISDN cards but only one BRI)?

What exactly is a BRI? Well, more exactly, if you have multiple ISDN
cards, why would having only one BRI make you want to have only one
ISDN bus? Wouldn't it be better to have an ISDN bus on each card, and
then if you have a service which uses multiple cards at once, to have a
service which stakcs itself on multiple ISDN bus children, just as a
ccd takes multiple sd's and makes them into one big disk?

Take care,

Bill