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Re: A TCP/IP Question:



"Peter Rittwage" <rittwage@hotmail.com> writes:

>I wasn't aware that there was kernel support for any LocalTalk cards.  I
>have always just used a LocalTalk->Ethernet bridge.

/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/ltpc.c:

/***    ltpc.c -- a driver for the LocalTalk PC card.
 *
 *      Copyright (c) 1995,1996 Bradford W. Johnson <johns393@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
 *
 *      This software may be used and distributed according to the terms
 *      of the GNU General Public License, incorporated herein by reference.
 *
 *      This is ALPHA code at best.  It may not work for you.  It may
 *      damage your equipment.  It may damage your relations with other
 *      users of your network.  Use it at your own risk!
 *
 *      Based in part on:
 *      skeleton.c      by Donald Becker
 *      dummy.c         by Nick Holloway and Alan Cox
 *      loopback.c      by Ross Biro, Fred van Kampen, Donald Becker
 *      the netatalk source code (UMICH)
 *      lots of work on the card...
 *
 *      I do not have access to the (proprietary) SDK that goes with the card.
 *      If you do, I don't want to know about it, and you can probably write
 *      a better driver yourself anyway.  This does mean that the pieces that
 *      talk to the card are guesswork on my part, so use at your own risk!
 *
 *      This is my first try at writing Linux networking code, and is also
 *      guesswork.  Again, use at your own risk!  (Although on this part, I'd
 *      welcome suggestions)
 *
 *      This is a loadable kernel module which seems to work at my site
 *      consisting of a 1.2.13 linux box running netatalk 1.3.3, and with
 *      the kernel support from 1.3.3b2 including patches routing.patch
 *      and ddp.disappears.from.chooser.  In order to run it, you will need
 *      to patch ddp.c and aarp.c in the kernel, but only a little...
 *
 *      I'm fairly confident that while this is arguably badly written, the
 *      problems that people experience will be "higher level", that is, with
 *      complications in the netatalk code.  The driver itself doesn't do
 *      anything terribly complicated -- it pretends to be an ether device
 *      as far as netatalk is concerned, strips the DDP data out of the ether
 *      frame and builds a LLAP packet to send out the card.  In the other
 *      direction, it receives LLAP frames from the card and builds a fake
 *      ether packet that it then tosses up to the networking code.  You can
 *      argue (correctly) that this is an ugly way to do things, but it
 *      requires a minimal amount of fooling with the code in ddp.c and aarp.c.
 *
 *      The card will do a lot more than is used here -- I *think* it has the
 *      layers up through ATP.  Even if you knew how that part works (which I
 *      don't) it would be a big job to carve up the kernel ddp code to insert
 *      things at a higher level, and probably a bad idea...
 *
 *      There are a number of other cards that do LocalTalk on the PC.  If
 *      nobody finds any insurmountable (at the netatalk level) problems
 *      here, this driver should encourage people to put some work into the
 *      other cards (some of which I gather are still commercially available)
 *      and also to put hooks for LocalTalk into the official ddp code.
 *
 *      I welcome comments and suggestions.  This is my first try at Linux
 *      networking stuff, and there are probably lots of things that I did
 *      suboptimally.  
 *
 ***/
/* ltpc jumpers are:
*
*       Interrupts -- set at most one.  If none are set, the driver uses
*       polled mode.  Because the card was developed in the XT era, the
*       original documentation refers to IRQ2.  Since you'll be running
*       this on an AT (or later) class machine, that really means IRQ9.
*
*       SW1     IRQ 4
*       SW2     IRQ 3
*       SW3     IRQ 9 (2 in original card documentation only applies to XT)
*
*
*       DMA -- choose DMA 1 or 3, and set both corresponding switches.
*
*       SW4     DMA 3
*       SW5     DMA 1
*       SW6     DMA 3
*       SW7     DMA 1
*
*
*       I/O address -- choose one.  
*
*       SW8     220 / 240
*/

--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia