containing the userland visible thinks (i.e. ioctl definitions).
Remove all (both) old ioctls, as they had a brain dead API and made keeping
binary compatibility more or less impossible.
Replace by several new ioctls. While there, remove any arbitrary limits
(resulting from the old, broken ioctls) and allow any length of names
and passwords.
based on the existing net/if_spppsubr.c stuff.
While there are completely userland (bpf based) implementations available,
those have a vastly larger per packet overhead thus causing major CPU
overhead and higher latency. On an i386 base router, running a 486DX at 50MHz
my line (768kBit/s downstream) was limited to something (varying) between 10
and 20 kByte/s effective download rate. With this implementation I get full
bandwidth (~85kByte/s).
This is client side only. Arguably the right way to add full PPPoE support
(including server side) would be a variation of the ppp line discipline and
appropriate modifications to pppd. I promise every help I can give to anyone
doing that - but I needed this realy fast. Besids, on low memory NAT boxes
with typically a single PPPoE connection, this implementation is more
lightweight than a pppd based one, which nicely fits my needs.
martin