Re: Elks networking

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days since SLIP was outdated and mostly superseded by PPP in the mid-1990s.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