[Freemint-list] slip.xif?

[Miro Kropáček]

Hi David and welcome! :)

I’m a professional programmer and long-term Falcon owner who’s trying to
> get his old machine up and running again after almost 20 years in the
> cupboard.
>
That's a noble idea, I'll try to help you out. ;)

I’ve been researching building a serial (hardware) module to replace the
> ageing (and pretty poorly performing) ethernec system. Looking at the
> specs, the SCC chip ought to be able to do a similar job speed-wise. I
> thought I’d do a few experiments with SLIP and PPP under MiNT, talking to a
> Raspberry Pi initially.
>
Before jumping into the SLIP topic, I must mention this:
https://joy.sophics.cz/parcp/parcp-usb.html ... trust me, you wont be
willing to go back once tried. ;)

Googling popped up a message from 2013 suggesting slip.xif was going to be
> pulled, but the wiki page seems to have been updated in January this year
> (this is the one that recommends HSModem) and I can see a ppp.c and slip.c
> amongst the source.
>
Can you provide an url to this wiki page?

1. Is slip.xif deprecated?
>
More or less, yes. It was disabled by this commit:
https://github.com/freemint/freemint/commit/25294f68ed58fe2a4a73529a601783
9bcbeb1d20, making this:
http://sparemint.org/mailinglist/Mailing-Lists/MiNT-List.201312/52B98506.4060501@fairlite.co.uk.text
possible. In that or some nearby thread it has been mentioned in favour of
PPP.


> 2. If so Is there a replacement for PPP or SLIP?
>
PPP should be still "alive". However now I can see why it isn't -- PPP is
part of SLIP and it uses its routines (incl. the problematic O_GLOBAL code)
to actually transmit/receive. So perhaps Alan could shed some light on this.


> 3. If not, do I simply have to compile it from source?
>
Compile yes but I think you'll an error "O_GLOBAL is obsolete, please
update your driver" when running. Maybe it's possible to disable this
check, TBH I have no clue what the whole O_GLOBAL change is about.

4. Should HSModem be used with MiNT or not?
>
Definitely not, see SCC's readme:
https://github.com/freemint/freemint/blob/master/sys/xdd/scc/README ... now
I see where did you see the HSMODEM requirement, it's in SLIP.XIF's readme,
an ancient text file, yes.


> I should say that for a few years back in the late 90s I did actually have
> a very solid 115k connection between Falcon and a linux box of the era
> working perfectly.

Same for me, my first commit to the kernel tree was back in 2007 fixing a
bug I found in slattach. :-) So it definitely must have been working in a
post-1.16 release. That commit is here:
https://github.com/freemint/freemint/commit/89c9f9e74bd80a203bcc708a05332919638dc294
if you feel brave enough to compile from 10 years old source code. :-)


> Of course that would have been under KGMD (so probably MiNT 1.12 or
> similar?). My next step might have to be going back to that release to try
> to rule out hardware failure in the mean time.
>
See above, you can do it in a slightly newer build. :-)

-- 
MiKRO / Mystic Bytes
http://mikro.atari.org
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