Frozen Fish 2: PC/frozenfish_august_1995.bin/bbs/d07xx/d0779.lha/SANA/changes.txt

Text File | 1992-12-06 | 4KB | 68 lines

Changes

November 12th, 1992:

- Previous to this release, the SANA-II structure Sana2DeviceStats was
defined differently in sana2.h and sana2.i.  The assembly include file
contained an erroneous entry for a field labelled 'SoftMisses'.  This
field had been removed from the 'C' header file, but never from the
assembly include.  To resolve this problem, this field in the assembly
file has been kept (to preserve structure size), but marked as "Unused".
A ULONG has been added at the appropriate location in the header file,
and also marked as "unused".  If you were using the header file
definition for this structure, please take note that the structure size
has -changed-!

- The SLIP and CSLIP drivers have been included in this archive.  These
drivers are primarily useful only to an IP-based protocol stack, but
can be used in other applications.  See the documentation in driver_docs
for more information.

May, 1992:

There have been no substantive changes from the Novemeber 7 Draft for Final
Comment and approval.  There have been minor clarifications and typographical
corrections and a section was added to clarify ARCNET framing.

Since the Fish Disk/'91 DevCon draft of the SANA-II standard, here is a
summary list of the important changes:

- Packet type specification has been drastically simplified.  The original
standard called for a generalized "Packet Magic" which all drivers and
protocols had to deal with, even though few people should ever have to worry
about the problem.  We could also have specified that there are 802.3 SANA-II
drivers and that there are ethernet drivers and that if you want 802.3 and
ethernet (even if on the same wire) from the same machine, use two ethernet
boards.  This didn't make sense because we don't anticipate multiple protocols
needing to use 802.3 frames nor much encouragement for hardware manufactures
to provide special 802.3 drivers.  The current solution keeps the standard
simple and allows highly efficient implementations, but it does make ethernet
drivers a little more complex and does make using 802.3 frames harder.


- The original SANA-II device driver specification therefore called for
drivers to have no internal buffers and to get all buffers from protocols in
the form of a data structure called a NetBuff. Hence, all protocols were
required to use NetBuffs.  This was highly unsatisfactory since most
protocols are implemented from an existing code base which includes its own
buffer management scheme.  NetBuffs are removed from the standard and
replaced with a function callback.

- The original standard called for an interface to the ability of some hardware
to simultaneously accept packets for several hardware addresses.  Such a
feature is of dubious usefulness.  In order to simplify the standard, station
aliases are no longer part of the SANA-II Network Device Driver Specification.
If station aliasing does turn out to be a useful feature available on some
hardware for the Amiga, the standard can easily be extended to re-introduce
station aliasing.  Remember that all Exec drivers must check for io_Command
values not supported by the driver. Hence, SANA-II commands can be added
without requiring that existing drivers be rev'd.

- Since the IOSana2Req structure had to be changed anyway, many names in
<devices/sana2.h> have been changed to be more consistent with other system
names. It is believed that global search and replace should make this a mostly
trivial change and that the benefits gained from consistent naming outweigh
the inconvenience to those few who have existing SANA-II code.

- Events are now defined as a bit mask rather than as scalars.