SLIP coexisting with serial data?

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

I have a situation in which it would be useful to run SLIP on a serial
console.  Obviously, this won't work very well at present.  (The
machine has only one serial port and no useful network interfaces.)

I was looking at improving if_sl.c to support encapsulating "normal"
serial data on the SLIP's tty as packets, thus merging it into the
packet stream.  I ran into some problems, but think I can handle them;
I'm writing to ask if there's any interest from anyone else in this
sort of thing, in upgrading SLIP to support "normal" serial output.

I was thinking of making this another protocol type, akin to what I
mentioned (probably on tech-net) back in '02 - I just now (finally)
filed kern/43959 containing patches to support v6 as well as v4,
something that's easy compared to making the tty still work as a tty,
but which includes a good deal of multi-protocol scaffolding that's
semi-necessary for the way I've been envisioning doing serial data.

Thoughts?

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