Contiki: I wonder....

[Doppie1200]

Porting lightweight IP is one of the cool project I'm going to do in the future (unless someone beats me to it) A colleque of mine has already done it commercially. But I'm allowed to use his code as a guideline. But first I want to program a gamestarter.

I still haven't got the time really. I'm still in progress redecorating/restoring my apartment (almost a year busy now).

So I hope I get around to it. BTW the contiki stack is not a candidate. Contiki is a coorperative operating system. That will not do on AmigaOs. You'll need some changed done to get it to amiga multitasking.

[Doppie1200]

As far as I know contiki is a coorperative multitasking environment. Keep in mind that contiki is designed to run on 8bits 64k (or less) devices. A preemitive task scedular would take too much ram (and time) due to it's complexity.

someone might have come up with something in the meantime that allows use of such scedular with contiki I don't know. My information might be old since I have not looked at contiki for some time.

Sure it can be ported to Amiga but why should you. The Amiga has a supperior OS sitting in it's ROM.

I'm more interested in lightweight-IP and that sort of thing. Does anyone know if someone attempted to port that to Amiga. I'd very much like to do it myself the next winter (these projects should not be attempted during the summer).

[Doppie1200]

Thats is what I was talking about. there is micro-Ip (uIP) which is for microcontrollers. I've been told that this stack would not be really usefull for Amiga. It is ment to be in embedded controllers. The application is known and therefor the stack is very much tailored for the application at hand.

To be able to provide something like bsdsocket it will be easier to use lightweight-IP. A collegue of mine has sourcecode for that. I intend to use that as bases. When I have more time I'll look up some links for you.

Gotta go now. Lunch time!

[Doppie1200]

Well Im kind of eager to start on it. But I have one programming project preceeding it. That will be my game database/starter. But since I have zero Amiga programming experience it will take some time getting worked in (I'm more into win32 and embedded systems). Adding to that the fact I will not do much programming in the upcoming summer it may take awhile for my project to see the light of day. So please be patient (or beat me to it ;-)). Anyways happy birthday.

[Doppie1200]

Yes, my main occupation is software designing. During my coffee breaks I check amiga.org. (must cut down on my coffee breaks) Anyway I don't think it will be all that difficult learning the Amiga. The main problem I see is lack of proper documentation availanble. The amiga system is pretty old and uncommen. Its not I walk into a store and get myself a book or something.

[Doppie1200]

Some of my colleques have done amiga programming in their carreer. I got 2 books for free from them. One is an Os1.3 reference the orher an OCS hardware reference. The latter is in german :-(.

I also have the developer cd 2.1. So i think it will be enough to get me started.

As for the stack. I know you have an A500 so there might not be anything in it for you.

The A500 has no easy obtainable network interface. I would puy my stack on top of cnet.device. That means an A600 or 1200 would be required (guess what's in my fleet).

Maybe I can make it OS1.3 compatible. Then it would require changing it to a hardware interface available on the A500 to make it work for you. Perhaps we could work something out there. But I have no means of doing any A500 related testing.

As for donations and such. I dont want to make any obligations. If people donate I'm obliged to deliver. To me it is just a hobby. I don't want to have a 'time to market'. Not that this means anything in amiga context. Even amiga itself does not seem to be aware of the concept 'time to market'
 :lol:

But I'm sure I will look into this matter as soon as my game database/starter is finished (which I haven't even started aswell.....so many ideas...so little time).

[Doppie1200]

Great! I didn't know that. I'm still not going to port it :-)

[Doppie1200]

Don't worry it was just an idea of yourse. Maybe I did fancy the obligation.

why do you think 1.3 is that bad.
The NIC I was talking about has nothing to do with the OS.
Nic is just the network interface. None of the amiga OSses have something like that build in. That does not mean you cant implement a network interface. This just takes some effort in hardware and in software.

As for hardware; with big box amiga's this is no problem. Just insert a network card.
As for wedgies the A600 and 1200 can use the PCMCIA interface to use a network card. The A500 has no such interface. (I'm speaking of interfacing directly to a network not via dialup).

There is a processor bus on the left if I recall correctly. And if that is unusable just pop the cpu and piggyback the expantions between the cpu and it's socket :-)

What you would need is a piece of hardware that allows your amiga to interface to the network. And a piece of software like cnet.device. I beleive the latter is called a SANA-II driver or something. You could slam the to be created TCP/IP stack on top of that and you'd end up with a networking enabled OS1.3.

Upgrading to a newer OS would not be needed if all the software is 1.3 compatible.

[Doppie1200]

Fine. So I will not have to bother making the tcp stack 1.3 compatible. There will probably be too few programs making use of the stack. What are the requirements for amiga explorer anyway?

[Doppie1200]

Trev wrote:
@Doppie1200

Amiga Explorer needs bsdsocket.library emulation for IP. I'm really liking the idea of a real bsdsocket.library wrapper for lwIP that handles access to the network dynamically (i.e. the network is available as long the library is loaded by at least one task). I really hate that most Amiga stacks run like an application and not a service.

Trev

Maybe they had good reason to implement the stacks that way I don't know. I'll keap your idea in mind when I'm going to take this beyond ythe vapour stages.

[Doppie1200]

Just realising most of this thread is offtopic but here goes another post.

Generale wrote:
Anyway I have a question about having a dynamically loaded stack.
Would it at least have a small resident portion to load the stack when there is incoming data?


how easy is it to initialise whenever the stack is required by an incoming packet, for uses such as file sharing

My interpretation was that the stack was loaded on demand. An incoming packet would never load a TCP/IP stack. When something like filesharing is active the stack would be loaded. The filsharing software will listen for incoming data (connectionless or not). Filesharing means there is a demand for the stack to be present.
But when filesharing is off and no other programs are active that requires a stack the stack should unload.

I like this idea and will surely look into it. But for staters I guess its best to get it going the traditional way and have the user load/unload the stack.