Gioacchino Mazzurco, Author at Freifunkblog

GSoC 2014 Final – OpenWrt: IEEE 802.1ad VLAN support

Posted on 20. August 2014 by Gioacchino Mazzurco

Hi all!

Because I have worked very hard in the first part of GSoC, the implementation was almost done already for mid term, in the second part I have been mostly testing the code, and taking advantage of it in a lot of setups 🙂

The GSoC experience have been very formative to me and I would like to repeat it next year either as student or mentor 🙂

Moreover I’ll suggests to apply to GSoC to a lot of friends!

Many thanks to Freifunk to chose my proposal I hope you will take advantage of 802.1ad too 🙂

Cheers!

GSoC 2014 Updates – OpenWrt: IEEE 802.1ad VLAN support

Posted on 23. June 2014 by Gioacchino Mazzurco

As promised I have been working hard on the proposal. Thanks to community help I have already almost completed all deliverables and in fact some patches got merged in netifd [10-13] and OpenWrt [15] already and development branch of libre-mesh is already taking advantage of them [14] 🙂

Working on this project gave me more conviction that community collaboration is fundamental, community helped me to understand the problem and what to modify to fix it, moreover someone went beyond that submitting patches too [16-17] !

Here it goes a small resume of how I did it:

– Talk multiple time with OpenWRT [0] folks via retroshare openwrt lobby, they gave me some indication on what I had to do

– Get netifd code [18]

– Create a vlandev netifd device

– Implement routines to add and remove 802.1ad/802.1q vlan in Linux via netlink

– Talk with OpenWRT folks for quality check and patch merging

– Code cleaning and testing

– Patches get merged in netifd and OpenWRT

Now who need to use 802.1ad is not unfortunately constrained to private software anymore, because it is now supported in OpenWRT [0] 😀

More updates [6] soon, and don’t forget the best is yet to come!

[0] https://openwrt.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1ad

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1q

[6] https://gitorious.org/netifd/gsoc2014-netifd/

[10] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=247f42d1907dbb16033dcb9a28548c4591af9d67

[11] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=f8981d9933683e1a8314fa86ac610f8e9a22661c

[12] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=59217785704fca27d2c7a19e279d27c384a452cd

[13] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=6e70adc5eca0dc1cc52a5838e86d937efdf8a38c

[14] https://github.com/libre-mesh/lime-packages/tree/develop

[15] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt.git;a=commit;h=083f6c12710d951bffb7fb4d7ec336704c9f0515

[16] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=24388f1ff259ba4eb69a6ce45e3c64b98f041c6b

[17] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=commit;h=55b39e8c0a650146ebb416d0656b271e409eff2b

[18] http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/netifd.git;a=summary

OpenWrt: IEEE 802.1ad VLAN support

Posted on 11. May 2014 by Gioacchino Mazzurco

This is my first time as GSoC student and I am very glad to have been accepted in the Freifunk organization. I am a computer science student, therefore my life should be full of this kind of experiences, but unfortunately there are few possibilities to develop interesting applications and get a decent wage, due to the ever-increasing cuts in the sphere of research. The university offers several tedious unpaid apprenticeship with few learning value, generally works that machines are supposed to do instead of human beings. Moreover, the state of uncertainty that austerity politics ail people, kills their creativity. The GSoC wage, in addition to community help and fertile environment, will allow me to have some tranquillity and time to devote myself to think on creative ideas and implementing a long awaited feature in OpenWRT.

I have been hacktive in wireless community networks since years and I have seen a lot of situations where the use of the IEEE 802.1ad standard would make a drastic difference. Many times unlucky people were forced to use proprietary software because of the need for 802.1ad. An open implementation of this standard was not available in the past and only recently has it been implemented in the Linux kernel. What is still missing is an UCI standard way to configure 802.1ad interfaces, so at the moment this feature is still not usable by OpenWRT users.

OpenWRT is a Linux distribution primarly designed for embedded devices (e.g. routers) and we currently use it on our community network devices because it is the most suitable for our needs. Furthermore, the OpenWRT community and community networks have wide intersections both in thinking and in participants.

First of all I need to understand better the netifd (OpenWRT network manager) internals, then in agreement with OpenWRT developers I am going to define an 802.1ad UCI device configuration schema and implement its management inside netifd. I am going also to provide a new syntax for 802.1q devices but keeping retrocompatibility, then I am going to update the UCI documentation, do serveral testing and discuss with OpenWRT developers about how to merge the new code in the official repository.

I have already contacted OpenWRT developers and my mentors who seem pleased to help me, I will work hard on this project and I would like to see OpenWRT 802.1ad support rock-solid as soon as possible 🙂 I will push my day by day work on a netifd clone repository on Gitorious, so keep watching it.

More updates soon, and don’t forget the best is yet to come!