Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
Ben Greear <[email protected]> writes:
My assumption for bridging a bitstream is that timeslot sync is not
absolutely critical. However, IF
you could be sure of time-slot sync, you'd have a lot more power and
be able to do some extra ticks
in user-space I think...
Not sure what do you want to do with that, but it may be critical for
many things.
The key for me is that if you ever miss a slot in bit-stream mode, you
can never make it up because
every bit is critical.
I think you'd have to perform some recover procedure then, that's similar
to DCE losing sync.
The recovery is to simply drop a few time slices. Whatever protocol is
running over
the wire must be able to deal with it.
This leads to having to drop arbitrary data to
keep from ever-increasing latency on your
bridge.
If your clocks are synchronized (for example, if you get a "master"
clock from your public phone exchange and you propagate it downstream,
or your machine is the "master") then you never drop anything, the
input and output rates are equal and in sync.
If you are bridging in user-space (or kernel, for that matter), it is
possible your writing process
will not be scheduled in time to fill up the tx buffer with real data.
So, it would have to be
padded by the driver and/or NIC hardware. With an adequately powered
machine, this should
be a rare occurrence, however.
With HDLC, you can skip the flags and make up time if you
ever miss a timeslot (assuming the
HDLC is not using the line at 100% capacity.)
Sure. Even at 100% you can just drop a frame, HDLC applications must
be prepared for it.
Agreed.
I'd be happy with a software approach. In fact, if I could get a
framed packet (ie, I know that
byte 0 is channel 1, byte 24 is channel 24, and byte 25 is channel 1
again...) then I could even
do the multiplexing in user space.
Well, with software framing it would look a bit different - there
is no such thing as "packet" as both TX and RX is continuous, not
aligned to anything etc. You would have to detect channel boundaries,
and bit-shift the data. Requires the sync serial controller (and FALC)
in transparent mode (I would have to look at some docs). I think
the kernel is a better place for things like that due to latency
issues.
I would definitely want the driver/hardware to deal with the byte/bit
boundaries. But,
the user-space read API could be similar to UDP (or HDLC if I understand
it correctly),
but it would always return a multiple of the number of channels in bytes
(0, 24, 48, ... for and entire T1).
For write, I'd also need to be able to guarantee that byte 0 goes to
channel 1, etc. So, if the
driver bit-stuffed, then it would need to do an entire time-slice at once.
BTW: An HDLC frame can use many slices. You can in fact have many
HDLC frames (from different streams) multiplexed. You just need
a multi-stream device or a multiplexer.
Good.
* Configure entire T1 as HDLC transport, bridge HDLC frames from one
T1 to the other.
Excellent. I actually want to write the bridge logic myself in
user-space..I just need the driver
API and at least one driver that supports it and has support for
readily available T1/E1 hardware.
If you want the userspace HDLC bridge... I'd use a pair of T1/E1 cards
with generic HDLC support, for example, Cyclades PC300 (never used them
and while I don't exactly like their driver, in case of problems I could
add T1/E1 to my own driver which currently supports PC300 X.21 and
V.24/V.35).
Once T1/E1s are working and the required slots are selected:
sethdlc hdlc0 hdlc (options)
sethdlc hdlc1 hdlc (options)
ifconfig hdlc0 up
ifconfig hdlc1 up
man PF_PACKET
A single HDLC stream is a simple thing because it's exactly what
the cards are designed for.
Before I settle on hardware, I'd like to have some idea that the NIC can
deal with raw
bit-streams. It seems all of the NICs can handle HDLC, so that part
should be pretty
easy.
Thanks,
Ben
--
Ben Greear <[email protected]>
Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
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