Using SLIP with SCO Xenix/Unix

Lance C Norskog thinman at cup.portal.com
Wed Apr 11 09:00:29 AEST 1990


Streamlined TCP/IP also supports SL/IP under SCO Xenix and SCO Unix.
It's architected as 2 pieces: 1) the slip pushable module processes
network device driver (LLI) messages at the top and a 2-way stream
of bytes at the bottom, and 2) the TTR (TTY Remora module) is a
Streams device driver at the top and a UNIX line discipline at the bottom.
If a multi-port card supports alternate line disciplines (always iffy,
but if you can make the SCO event stuff work with a mouse, the TTR should work.
)
The software can be set up to handle dial-ins via a special accounts 
(one account per client IP address), but does not auto-dial.

This architecture is inefficient, essentially because you can't tell a
standard UNIX serial driver to spool a thousand bytes in a low-level queue
until it sees the SL/IP inter-packet marker; the TTR has to spool
them up instead, incurring software overhead.  Of course, BSD doesn't
handle this either.  The right way to handle this is with a Streams
serial driver which can be told to do the spooling.

The only public-domain SL/IP device driver posted ran all the data out to
a user program.  This has got to be much slower than the above architecture.

Lance Norskog
Sales Engineer
Streamlined Networks
408-727-9909u!



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