On Fri Dec 14 2007 at 10:56:14 -0600, reed@reedmedia.net wrote:
> What needs to be done to support network interfaces in userland?
> 
> I am mostly curious about this for developing and testing without 
> rebooting kernels.
> 
> If this has been discussed before, please point me to it.
> 
> By the way, I have a USB-based internal wireless interface I want 
> supported:

I haven't really given it thought, but some ramblings:

You need to access the hardware somehow.  For this you probably need a
userspace "port" of bus_space and bus_dma, although I don't know how
exactly that would work.  You also need to tap into the interrupts,
for which polling might be a better (easier) solution.

You should be able to hack interfacing with the kernel networking stack
with tap(4).  Not really perfect, but should work.

For wireless need to run net80211 in userspace also.

So, not really "compile & go" for the time being.

-- 
Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi>                     Of course he runs NetBSD
http://www.iki.fi/pooka/                          http://www.NetBSD.org/
    "la qualité la plus indispensable du cuisinier est l'exactitude"