HEADS UP: I4B going away entirely

[Hans Petter Selasky]

Hi,

My ISDN4BSD has some non-technical issues that makes it difficult for some 
people to commit to the main FreeBSD tree. I am however working on a new 
product called openzap.hps:

svn --username anonsvn --password anonsvn checkout 
svn://svn.turbocat.net/i4b/trunk/openzap.hps

If someone wants to mentor this project with regard to a future FreeBSD 
commit, please feel free to step forward.

Looking back at the history:

ISDN4BSD was my first FreeBSD hardware driver project. I started working on 
this around year 2000. At some point I got very much attention about my YES 
and NO macros and how I generated a complete ISDN driver from a single macro. 
The main reason for doing it like that was that it saved me a lot of time 
when I wanted to propagate changes into "N" different drivers at the same 
time without having to edit "N" different files. Simply because I wasn't sure 
how the best way was to do it.

There are some things in my ISDN4BSD that are not so smart designwise. For 
example my ISDN4BSD does not support zero copy of data from the hardware into 
a mbuf, hence I have not seen any ISDN hardware that implements zero copy. 
Most ISDN hardware I've been working with either:

1) Uses a PIO FIFO.
2) Uses a ring buffer in RAM.

When I started working on USB the PCI USB host hardware was working quite 
different than my ISDN hardware and many issues like cache syncing popped up 
during development which I never thought about when working with my ISDN4BSD 
system.

My plan is to use the lessons I've learned from my first ISDN4BSD and then my 
USB4BSD when I design my OPENZAP.HPS. Hopefully it will turn out much better.

--HPS

On Friday 16 May 2008, Oliver von Bueren wrote:
> Hi
>
> Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
> > this email is to inform you that I4B will be entirely removed from CVS
> > from FreeBSD 7 and 8 soon.
> >
> > The problem as previously pointed out is missing locking and the
> > reason this hasn't happened/finished was the lack of time and the
> > catching up with what happened in freebsd infrastructure the last years
> > resulting in a larger rewrite for parts.
>
> OK then, FreeBSD does not support ISDN out of the box anymore. Primary,
> that's a sad thing, but it is also a good thing for change.
>
> I don't want to start a big discussion about which version of I4B is in
> the tree again, but I just recently read that HPS is in a final stage of
> the USB4BSD implementation and my understanding is, that this is going
> to be in the tree then. As the motivation of this U4B was the
> elimination of GIANT from I4B-HPS, wouldn't this be the opportunity to
> go that route for this as well?
>
> I mean, FreeBSD for me is still the OS to use for ISDN and  VoIP on
> standard pc hardware as well as (or especially for) embedded systems.
>
> Oliver
>
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