Package request

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 05:06:53PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > Wondering if it would be possible to include Phil Wood's mmap patches for
> > libpcap in the fedora repos?
> > 
> > His patches can be found here:
> > http://public.lanl.gov/cpw/
> 
> Any reason why they're not in upstream source (http://www.tcpdump.org/)?
Probably no effort made to merge them, so far. 

Performance gains are nice, but it does need some work to be of sufficient
quality to be packaged, I'm sure. Fully using that would also require 
recompiling tcpdump, wireshark etc. to use a dynamic libpcap so the mmap
version could be used as a drop-in replacement.

Minuses:

The code is a bit x86/x86_64 specific (inline assembly
in pcap-ring.h/.c for defining mb();), doesn't compile on fc6/x86_64 
(remove #include <asm/system.h> for that, didn't check if it works, I 
had it working a-ok a while ago with some tweaks, I _think_ something else
was needed too)

Based on a somewhat old libpcap that has some bugs (packets being
counted twice in the stats being the most noticeable, that got fixed in
0.9.5 upstream, that code is based on ~= 0.9.3).

Nice little project for someone, but not something that can just appear
in Fedora tomorrow. Probably worth contacting Phil Wood asking if he's still
working on it, and if not pick the thing up, update to 0.9.5,
and work with upstream after that.

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen