Re: Elks networking

Marc-François LUCCA-DANIAU
2016-05-31T09:15:43Z

> Ideally, it would be better if we had an NE2000 Ethernet card driver; My understanding is that the NE2000 is emulated by practically every single popular x86 emulation platform in existence and its interface is used by a huge variety of older network adapters; if someone feels like making ktcp talk NE2000, it would probably help on the networking side.

I am also interested in such NE2000 driver, because the ETH chip on my
SBC is an Asix AX88796-L, and according to its datasheet, it claims
"register level compatibility with NE2000".

MFLD

2016-05-29 8:31 GMT+02:00 Jody Bruchon <jody@jodybruchon.com>:
> On 2016-05-28 16:17, Derek Johansen wrote:
>>
>> Do sockets/networking work in elks and if so to what extent and in
>> what environment. In my environment of elks on qemu on Ubuntu on Vbox
>> on win8.1 when I try to run telnet I get a system crash.
>
>
> As far as I am aware, ELKS only supports SLIP connections via a serial port.
> The networking code has gone untested for a very long time. Most of us don't
> have an 8086-era machine connected to a modern PC via serial port with a
> SLIP server configured.
>
> The TCP/IP/SLIP stack is in a binary called 'ktcp'. Given the fact that
> various annoying kernel and core utilities bugs still exist, most of the
> development focus has been on correcting those first. The lack of memory
> protection on the 8086 platform means any program has 'root'-level access to
> the entire system and situations that would cause a segmentation fault on
> Linux-i386 can easily take down the entire system on ELKS; this combined
> with the ease with which C lets you shoot yourself in the foot plus the
> severely limited program + data + stack space in the ELKS memory model makes
> "crashing" bugs more difficult to find and more important to catch.
>
> If you want to start somewhere, look in the elks/Documentation directory.
> There should be info on how to use ktcp and SLIP to connect ELKS to an IP
> network. On the emulator side of things, you need to emulate a serial port
> and forward that serial port to a SLIP server in some roundabout manner,
> which is almost certainly the hard part these days since SLIP was outdated
> and mostly superseded by PPP in the mid-1990s.
>
> Ideally, it would be better if we had an NE2000 Ethernet card driver; I once
> bought an NE2000-compatible 8-bit ISA card but the 8086 PC I had picked up
> (free) to put it in refused to boot from any media of any sort, so I
> unfortunately had to give up. My understanding is that the NE2000 is
> emulated by practically every single popular x86 emulation platform in
> existence and its interface is used by a huge variety of older network
> adapters; if someone feels like making ktcp talk NE2000, it would probably
> help on the networking side.
>
> -Jody
>
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