[...]
>Ideas are fine, but I got sick of people talking about networking and just
>wrote it. Writing code is much faster for development than yakking about
>it.
Also remember that this is a meritocracy. The best way to get people to listen
to your ideas is to implement them and show people.
[...]
>> -Even a for a desktop it would be hard to find a net card to _work_ in
>> it.
>
>Not at all. 8086 simply means it's only got an 8bit slot so you get an
>8bit card, such as an ne1000 or a wd8003. Over the years, I've found that
>quite a few 16 bit cards will work in 8bit slots.
I've used a number of PnP network cards on elderly 8088 hardware (a Zenith
Z150, to be exact). It, like, just worked, even with half the connector
dangling over the motherboard. The one good feature of the PC world is the
truly amazing backwards compatibility.
>> -If somehow we could deal with theese, the BIGgest problem is the memory
>> a IP+TCP+UDP implementation would be _very_ expensive in memory
>
>I dunno about that. My ethernet driver is 3k, which is quite 'expensive',
>but is quite possible to shrink it. Remember that the etherboot supports
>ethernet, IP, UDP, rarp/bootp and tftp in under 16k, along with quite a
>few extras in there too.
TCP/IP isn't nearly as expensive as you (Vali) think. It's too big to put into
the kernel, yes, but we wouldn't want it to go there anyway (the network
driver would go in the kernel but the stack would be in user space). We could
easily, easily get a full TCP/IP implementation into a single process slot
(which is 64+64, remember; that's a lot of memory). 8086 code is very dense.
Aren't some people working on network drivers? Are they at the stage where we can
transmit and receive ethernet frames yet?
--
+- David Given ---------------McQ-+
| Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | If you want to surf the Information
| Play: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Superhighway, be prepared to be run over.
+- http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/~dg -+
