Re: SyncPPP Generic PPP merge

[Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>]

Jeff Mcadams writes:

> Indeed.  And let me just throw out another thought.  A clean abstraction
> of the various portions of the PPP functionality is beneficial in other
> ways.  My personal pet project being to add L2TP support to the kernel
> eventually.  A good abstraction of the framing capabilities and basic
> PPP processing would be rather useful in that project.

That is exactly what ppp_generic.c is intended to do - it abstracts
out the framing and encapsulation and low-level transport of PPP
frames into ppp "channels" (see for example ppp_async.c,
ppp_synctty.c) while ppp_generic.c does the basic PPP processing
(compression, multilink, handling the network interface device etc.).

You should be able to write an L2TP channel to work with ppp_generic -
all your code would need to know about is how to take a PPP frame and
encapsulate and send it, and how to receive and decapsulate PPP
frames.

[Note to myself: send in a Documentation/ppp_generic.txt which
describes the interface between ppp_generic.c and the channels.]

> I would agree that such a project would be 2.5 material.

Do it today if you like, I can't see that adding a new PPP channel
could break anything else, it would be like adding a new driver.

Paul.