Re: Mirage vs. FreeBSD Networking

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 Aug 2013, at 15:33, PÁLI Gábor János <pgj@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I have talked about this a little bit with Bjoern Zeeb and he
> recommended to set a distinct MAC address for each of the Mirage
> modules.  So (a) the frames will not looped back, (b) not all the
> traffic will be hijacked by the Mirage stack (in other cases), only
> the frames that are addressed to it, (c) this way multiple modules on
> the system can safely co-exist, including the FreeBSD networking
> stack.
> 
> However, this implies somehow a unique MAC address has to be assigned
> to the module -- I did not find any way to do this in the mirari
> configuration, hence I guess this has to be generated automatically
> (and transparently).  Bjoern told me that the FreeBSD kernel also has
> such routines implemented for other purposes, so I could piggyback on
> this probably.

This should be possible in the Mirari autogenerated portion -- you
just need to use the (brand new) ocaml-ipaddr library to generate a
local MAC and ensure that it's attached to the VIF.

The details really depend on the kFreeBSD OS.Netif module -- right
now, we only have ones for Xen and UNIX (tuntap).  Do you have an
implementation in the kFreeBSD branch at all?  We'd need a device
bus and interrupts/Activations before we could hook up a full Netif
though.

-anil