Hi all, I have a problem related to decoding for which I have a solution. I'd appreciate it if you could give me feedback on the proposal and suggest better alternatives, if possible.
The basic problem has to do with marking a frame as a "Malformed Frame". It is possible with the MDS family of switches & analyzer adapters to truncate frames delivered to Ethereal to prevent fewer frame drops and for other reasons. Separately, in SCSI, an initiator may allocate fewer bytes than required to return a response. For example, a normal INQUIRY response is about 48 bytes long, but there are lots of cases where hosts allocate as few as 4 bytes. In each of these cases, the frame is smaller than normal. Marking such frames as "Malformed" seems to cause confusion and affects viewing experience according to the feedback that I've received. It would be slow and bad for readability to check for every field if there are sufficient bytes present. What I was thinking was to instead add a field to the packet_info structure called "truncated". If this bit is set, instead of marking a frame as malformed when an exception is thrown, we should mark the frame as "truncated". Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I'll make the relevant changes and hope to check it in before the upcoming release, if the changes are simple enough. Thanks, Dinesh -- I am not young enough to know everything. - Oscar Wilde
