Adam Dunkels, author of Contiki and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, held a talk at NUCCC 2005 this weekend about writing really small TCP/IP stacks and making them withstand slashdottings. Adam’s various TCP/IP stacks have been both slashdotted and osnewsed several times. Nice quote from the talk: “Great hacks are the diamonds of computer science: ‘Useless’, yet priceless!”.
Writing really small TCP/IP stacks
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’ve been using the Protothreads library for a month or so now and it is great. Replacing dozens of little state machines with the protothreads cleans things up and speeds development. This guy knows what he is doing and is really helping the low end microcontrollers connect to other devices.
My embedded sensor systems don’t yet have the need for a TCP/IP stack yet but when they do this will be where I’ll look. Next version of uIP should be using protothreads.
They’ll love this, so they can hack it into the new “no networking” windows versions.
Remember the old days, when you needed Trumpet Winsock in order to get on the net???
How long before someone tacks on this sort of functionality? Or better yet, takes it from BSD?? (As MS themselves did).
I worked with an implementation of TinyTCP once. It was really great, and a lot of fun to work with.
I think the main problem with small stacks is the small memory footprint you get to work with. A 4k receive buffer and a 4k send buffer per socket adds up if you only have 32k of RAM to work with.
Plus, TCP/IP gets a bit weird with slow links (14.4 or less). You have to adjust a bunch of things like timeouts, for obvious reasons.
Trumpet winsock was the coolest.
http://www.trumpet.com.au/downloads.html
Winsock Trumpets YOU!
🙂
I remember way back when I was on dialup, I once lost my login password (which happened to be my stepdad’s email password, thus, we needed it
…
… my solution? I wasn’t a programmer at the time, but I was a bit of a geek, so I looked at some of the login script files and made one that got Trumpet to decode the password and display it in an alert box. I think I was 12 or 13.
I don’t think that being posted on a site that is basically a livejournal even compares with being posted on slashdot.
even winsock can hadle that on a 386SX
I remember Trumpet Winsock. Those were the days. Also reminds me of working on cc:Mail OS/2 gateways. ha ha
So what’s there aside from huge bloated open/star office that can open this ?
2MB total. Will let you view powerpoint presentations without installing powerpoint.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=428d5727-4…