bluetooth stack ported from NetBSD

[Iain Hibbert]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Maksim Yevmenkin wrote:

> furthermore, i want to go on the record here and say that if netgraph
> (due to its complexity, etc.) is a big problem here, and, prevents
> people from working on bluetooth in freebsd, i'm prepared to seriously
> consider netbt stack as alternative.

netgraph I considered too much work to look at and was no interest to have
it in NetBSD or OpenBSD. Then I think after some years nobody had stepped
up to make it work in DragonflyBSD so they have imported the netbt stack
also.

personally, I think that diversity is always good.  The vast majority of
applications use L2CAP or RFCOMM and the API for these are almost exactly
similar across the whole range of open OS's (BlueZ included).

I think even that there are some things in NetBSD that are still wrong (I
think that using a raw socket for HCI is not correct, we should address
devices directly -- but that is not going to change) or incomplete (SCO
support is not great though it does work on some platforms) and nobody
else picked up on libprop(3) so that has meant some rewriting down the
line (there are bthcid/btkey implementations in OpenBSD without libprop)

The way that the OS handles devices is always going to be different and
that will make more rewriting, so I would think that FreeBSD importing the
netbt stack "to gain SCO support" would not in the end necessarily make
anything simpler.

iain