Re: Discuss: Future of AX25, NETROM and ROSE in the kernel ?

On Wed, Apr 22, 2026 at 5:30=E2=80=AFAM Dan Cross <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Multiple userspace programs handling one or more logical connections,
> coordinating with a server of some kind implementing the lower-layers
> of a protocol, follows a pretty well-understood implementation
> pattern.  The same techniques the kernel uses to map file descriptors
> to such connections can be used in userspace: each connection is
> represented by some token that maps to an identifier that uniquely
> identifies the protocol-level connection in the server; the actual
> mapping from identifier to such connection is just a some kind of
> associative container maintained by the server. As events occur (data
> sent, data received, timers expire or are reset, control operations of
> various kinds) those connections are looked up, logic to handle the
> events is run, the connections might transition into new states, and
> side-effects (e.g., actual transmission of data, or re-arming a timer)
> are emitted and acted upon.
>
>         - Dan C.

Hi All,

Like Hugh I have also been lurking here for a long time but this is
also my first post,

As a fairly active user of the Kernel Ham stack for decades, seeing
this discussion start is timely because I have been wondering how I
could help, as I could see things seemed to be slowing down and
approaching a turning point where action is necessary.

I believe many people still rely on the kernel stack for BBS's,
Digipeaters, I-Gates, Winlink Gateways and nodes out there running IP
over AX25 - even things like PAT for Winlink which has no native KISS
support, so it relies on Kernel KISS interfaces (i use this
personally).

If there is a way I can help with maintenance or even become a
co-maintainer, I'd be interested to learn more as I've written kernel
drivers before and patched things - but never gotten involved in the
mainline kernel to date.

While I am still fairly proficient in C and have written AX25
implementations for Arduino projects among other things, I wonder (and
hope I don't unintentionally upset anyone by suggesting this) if there
is an opportunity to look at new options like using the recently
introduced kernel rust support to rewrite / tidy things up along the
way to resolve many of the memory safety and many other issues that
have been coming to light lately.

It would be a shame to let this "die on the vine" in both the kernel
and linuxax25 given all the work put in over the years.....

Regards,

Josh M
VK4JLM