Re: Uthernet programming question

[Jonno Downes <jonnosan@gmail.com>]

On Jan 22, 12:51 am, BLuRry <brendan.rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Right, I understand that the sky is the limit when you can do bare-
> metal programming on the Uthernet side.  However, under the control of
> a mammoth OS like OSX, Windows or Linux, what sort of constraints is
> one likely to run in to?  I remember that the Nintendo DS implemented
> some sort of proprietary MAC-based communication method, but in order
> to talk to the DS from a PC you had to have a specific wireless card
> and replace the driver, etc.  Is it possible to do bare-metal
> programming like this without having to go as far as writing drivers
> in a PC world?

The API's that *nix or Windows make available to a user-land
application "out of the box" do not give you direct access to the
frames travelling over the network, which is what would ne needed to
implement your own custom protocol over ethernet, instead of using
(for example) UDP or (if you were particularly adventurous).

However there is a cross platform library call libpcap on *nix, or
Winpcap on windows, that you can install and use to get access to the
raw ethernet frames.

But what are your concerns with using UDP? There is a light weight
6502 implementation of IP+UDP called ip65 http://www.paradroid.net/ip65/
- I'm using this as the starting point (to which I have added DHCP +
DNS) for a "network booting" project  I'm playing with , the source
for which is at https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=250168 if you
want to poke around.

Regards

Jonno