status layer 3

[Harald Welte]

Hi Andreas,

I'm going to pick up your questions as found in your preliminary
http://home.eversberg.eu/alpha3/ code.

I took the liberty of posting to the ML, as other people will definitely
be interested in this, too.

1) why is layer2 a socket client?

because we want to develop layer2 + layer3 + everything above on the PC first,
while keeping the L1 on the phone.  This makes debugging much easier.  Later
we will simply move the code to the phone and run it in one or multiple
tasks of the operating system, replacing sercomm + unix socket with message
queues.


2) where is layer3 to go?

I think we can directly put it into the layer2 program, but try to keep a clean
seperation between l2 and l3, using the REQUEST/RESPONSE/INDICATION primitives.


3) where should the app (layer4) go? library or console?

it should live on top of the l23 stack, preferrably as its own program.

There is a lot of sense for having the application (UI) as its own
process/thread, and the stack in its process/thread.


4) Is the TLV parser buffer-overflow safe?

TLV parser (libosmocore) is not buffer-overflow safe, patches are appreciated.


5) classmark1 lsb/msb twisted:

I have no idea  :)


6) lchan/ms mapping.

I don't have a clear idea on this either.  I'm not so sure if the 'lchan'
concept makes much sense in a phone at all.  A phone typically only uses one
dedicated channel at any given point - with corner cases in the event of a
handover, where we 'switch back' to the old channel if establishing the new
channel fails.


7) ms instantiation for multiple devices

I think this is not really an important issue at the moment.  If there are
multiple phones, there should be multiple instances (processes) of the layer23
stack.  A normal application would also exist 1:1 for each stack instance.

If you think of some PBX application, than I also think it is easier to have
one instance (process or thread) of the stack for each phone.

After all, the primary target for us is to make layer2+3 work in a phone,
and there it will definitely be one instance for one phone.


One additional comment:

Please make sure that the common/shared code between OpenBSC and your Layer3
does get moved into libosmocore.  I'm thinking particularly abotu code for
parsing and generating the various IE's.  We don't want to keep multiple
implementations around...


Thanks again for all your help,
	Harald

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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