Re: oskit-mach & oskit-20010214: network

[Roland McGrath]

I don't really know what lossage you are seeing, so I don't quite know what
to suggest.  Perhaps the easiest thing is to write some tiny test programs
that just use the Ethernet device directly and use those (without running
pfinet) to see what is going on.  

It is very easy to write a tiny program that just sends Ethernet packets
using device_write.  Just whip something up that sends packets you can
easily watch for on the wire, e.g. a broadcast or send to your other
machine's MAC address with some bogus Ethernet type field.  With that tiny
program, you can see whether sending packets works.  If packets get lost,
or get delayed somehow before they get to the wire, you can debug it with
nothing else going on.

Once any oddities there are debugged, you can move on to debugging the
receiving of packets.  The simplest test program for that is somewhat more
complex because you have to use device_set_filter and then listen for
messages.  But it's still easy enough to whip one up.  

Of course, verify both your test programs work right by running them under
gnumach (where I'm presuming your ethernet card works already) first.

If you later feel like cleaning this up into a single test program with
switches to do various useful simple testing of a network device, we would
be happy to fold that program in so everyone else can use it in the future
as the first step in testing/debugging any network driver problems.


Thanks,
Roland