On 2016-05-28 16:17, Derek Johansen wrote:
Do sockets/networking work in elks and if so to what extent and in what environment. In my environment of elks on qemu on Ubuntu on Vbox on win8.1 when I try to run telnet I get a system crash.
As far as I am aware, ELKS only supports SLIP connections via a serial port. The networking code has gone untested for a very long time. Most of us don't have an 8086-era machine connected to a modern PC via serial port with a SLIP server configured.
The TCP/IP/SLIP stack is in a binary called 'ktcp'. Given the fact that various annoying kernel and core utilities bugs still exist, most of the development focus has been on correcting those first. The lack of memory protection on the 8086 platform means any program has 'root'-level access to the entire system and situations that would cause a segmentation fault on Linux-i386 can easily take down the entire system on ELKS; this combined with the ease with which C lets you shoot yourself in the foot plus the severely limited program + data + stack space in the ELKS memory model makes "crashing" bugs more difficult to find and more important to catch.
If you want to start somewhere, look in the elks/Documentation directory. There should be info on how to use ktcp and SLIP to connect ELKS to an IP network. On the emulator side of things, you need to emulate a serial port and forward that serial port to a SLIP server in some roundabout manner, which is almost certainly the hard part these days since SLIP was outdated and mostly superseded by PPP in the mid-1990s.
Ideally, it would be better if we had an NE2000 Ethernet card driver; I once bought an NE2000-compatible 8-bit ISA card but the 8086 PC I had picked up (free) to put it in refused to boot from any media of any sort, so I unfortunately had to give up. My understanding is that the NE2000 is emulated by practically every single popular x86 emulation platform in existence and its interface is used by a huge variety of older network adapters; if someone feels like making ktcp talk NE2000, it would probably help on the networking side.
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