Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au> wrote:

FreeBSD netgraph. It's clean, it's generalised, it's just not very well documented. [...] Have a chat to the FreeBSD community. There's a powerpc port. Shoehorn FreeBSD into it somehow, help tidy up the code to do whateveer you need and start leveraging the very powerful network stack FreeBSD has.

Thanks for the tip - that sounds very nice indeed, very much like what I had in mind. It's nice to know that *someone* in the generic free OS world has had the foresight to design this thing right. (Just to be clear, I have no political preferences between Linux and FreeBSD; to me it's all a matter of what works and what I'm familiar with.) But it won't matter until I build the hardware: I want to build the hardware first, the HW itself will be totally open source as in free schematics and full docs etc, and then we'll think about which free OS(es) we want to run on it. I still want to build my MPC866 router platform though: even if the software part has been solved by the fine FreeBSD folks, with the present situation (PCI as the expansion interface on FreeBSD/Linux-based routers) one still has the issue that the HDLC interface or the ATM SAR block has to be wheel-reinvented each time someone wants a different flavor of Layer 1 physical interface. The situation is even more pronounced when a given Layer 1 medium type (say, T1 or SDSL) exists in both HDLC and ATM flavors. I would really like to be able to have a single hardware card that supports both: it is trivial with MPC86x, but I expect it to be cost-prohibitive to do that on a PCI card. MS