On Thursday 23 July 2009 17:34:52 ext Dan Williams wrote:

There are any number of devices that expose only one AT port (which of
course gets used by PPP for data) and then a proprietary port.  The
proprietary port usually uses a custom USB protocol that can also handle
SMS, status, RSSI, etc while the AT/PPP port is being used by ppp.

So if that's the case for phonet, maybe you just want to provide either
(a) documentation of the setup/status/sms/etc protocols, or (b) a shim
library implementation for them that handles communication with the
device itself.

Eventually, Ofono should get the missing bits for GPRS-via-Phonet.

But IMHO, the call setup stuff is probably better done from userspace.

I was referring to cellular data connectivity. Indeed, I wouldn't propose 
Netlink for network selection and circuit-switched services like SMS or voice 
calls :)

It's a really hard API to abstract.  I guess you could write a netlink
API for it like we have for 802.11, but with GSM/CDMA the standards are
so widely ignored that it's just going to be impossible to get a stable
kernel API for anything like this.

Really, you only need a way to:
- create a device, e.g. like IPIP tunnel devices,
- set it up: access point name, and optionally username and password,
- bring it up, get IP and DNS configurations from the network,
- watch for context suspend events: IFF_NOCARRIER could do that,
- and eventually tear down.

In fact, it seems much simpler than 802.11. Well OK, I ignored "details" such 
as secondary contexts and quality of service.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Nokia Devices R&D, Maemo Software, Helsinki

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