Subject: RiscBSD Dialup Networking
To: RiscBSD <port-arm32@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Mike Pumford <mpumford@mpc-data.co.uk>
List: port-arm32
Date: 12/10/1996 16:13:59
With all the talk about people wishing to use RiscBSD for dialup networking.

I have been successfully used pppd to connect my RiscBSD machine to demon. 
Unfortunately the serial port device driver drops a lot of characters and 
also can hang the kernel entirely. It is also only possible to invoke pppd
once in any one session as running it a second time causes the machine to 
hang.

I have successfully modified the serial port device driver so that no data
is lost but I have not been able to see what is causing the other problems.

All these problems occur with the unaltered 'current' driver and my 
modified one.

If no one in the kernel team is working on improving the serial device 
driver then perhaps I could send my modified one to somebody for 
inclusion into the kernel source tree.  

I'll post some bug reports when I get home from work where I've got the stack
trace info.

I would be interested in continuing work on enhancing the device drivers 
part of the kernel. The catch is that the only piece of hardware I have 
got is an Acorn SCSI card for which the driver is already quite well 
developed.

I don't think I would be capable of writing a device driver from scratch 
without the aid of some more documentation on how the kernel works but I 
am willing to learn. I do have some device driver experience with OS/2 
device drivers. 


Mike