Re: 2.4 and Strong Cryptography...

[Marc Mutz]

Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> 
<snip>
> > All those "crypto goodies" like CIPE, ppdd and IPSec (FreeS/WAN) are
> > a mixture of a (usually small) kernel module and a userspace daemon
> > (or setup tools). So you need to download the package anyway,
> > because userspace and kernel are so closely coupled. Look at ISDN,
> > look at pcmcia support and how long it took to include it into the
> > mainstream kernel. Still the most part of the users download the
> > external packages.
> 
> So what you are saying is that IPv4 should not be included because
> there are userspace tools that need to be downloaded to be able to use
> those features such as ifconfig(8), route(8), arp(8), ip(8),
> ipfwadm(8), ipportfw(8), ipautofw(8), ipchains(8), etc...  Taking it
> to the sublime -- lets not include the kernel because you would need
> to download bash(1)!  There may be other issues, but I don't think
> this one is particularly compelling.
> 
<snip>

Needing userspace is not the point. Userspace being so closely coupled
that I frequently need to re-compile the userspace part when I upgrade
the kernel part within a series (say 2.2) is the problem. It was the
reason, why raid-0.90 didn't make it into 2.2.12. It is possibly (one of
the) reason why pcmcia took so long as 2.4 to be included in the kernel
proper and why up to 2.2.1[23] all the users of ISDN ignored the isdn
drivers in the kernel and went for the cvs version.

Have you recompiled util-linux since 2.2.1? IMO the kernel<->userspce
interface needs settling before anything can make it into a stable
kernel. But that's only my opinion, YMMV.

Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <[e-mail]>        http://marc.mutz.com/Encryption-HOWTO/
University of Bielefeld, Dep. of Mathematics / Dep. of Physics

PGP-keyID's:   0xd46ce9ab (RSA), 0x7ae55b9e (DSS/DH)