Hi Mokhi,
On Tuesday, February 13, 2018 6:52:51 PM CET Mahdi Mokhtari wrote:
Hi,
After some time of playing with the B.A.T.M.A.N protocol and net-interface on OpenWRT and Debian I was thinking to use it with the servers I use everyday (and maybe on routers/appliances I have nanoBSD on).
So I started an effort... (As a background) I already ported some applications to FreeBSD [and I'm maintaining them] and also I did work already on the Linux emulation layer of FreeBSD (FreeBSD has a Linux syscall-emulation and Linux-KPI layers). So my approach (as naturally I didn't expect the build of batman-adv.ko to be successful as is), was based on the approach that we [at FreeBSD] did to port Linux's drm... https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm I ended up in adding some header-files to FreeBSD Linux-KPI (like average.h, percpu.h, ...). Now I'm at a state that Netlink blocks me and I'm to determine next step :-) [Which I don't assume it being trivial with my current approach]
That sounds interesting ... will you be able to follow up the port with our development, or what is your plan on that? I'd assume that you need to rewrite a rather large chunk of "Linuxism" as you say, and I would assume that porting newer versions as we release would be quite some manual work.
So I'd like to ask: 1- Is it better approach to "rewrite" batman-adv.ko [at least Netlink-ish (let's call "Linuxism") parts] than what I'm doing now?
I don't have enough knowledge of FreeBSD to answer that. I would assume that the skb handling and netlink/debugfs parts are Linux specific. You'd at least need to rewrite those. You better don't touch the routing code, I would not advise rewriting that.
2- Any other efforts are being done out there?
I'm not aware. At least nothing serious (I remember someone demanding batman- adv to work in web browsers). :D
3- is batmand deprecated [So I should mainly focus on batman-adv.ko]?
We agreed to not call it deprecated, but there hasn't been any developments in the past 7 years except for some build-specific issues. I'd suggest to focus on batman-adv.ko. batmand may be easier to port though, but I see more people using batman-adv today.
4- any other comments do you have? :D
Good luck! :D
And please keep us posted!
P.S. sorry if I'm not really good at starting conversation from scratch and out-of-nowhere :D but I hope by continuing the collaboration we can have better (more enriched) FreeBSD and better (as in more portable) B.A.T.M.A.N :-)
Looking forward to it!
Cheers, Simon