to avoid drops even on slow NICs.

needed now that performance is up.

almost everywhere else.

names.

Add "dev" pointer in struct net_device to tie network interfaces back to a
hardware device.

Force natural alignment of data types in __table() macros.  This seems to
prevent gcc from taking the unilateral decision to occasionally increase
their alignment (which screws up the table packing).

of alloc_pkb() exhaustion when e.g. an iSCSI-booted DOS session is left
idle for a long time at the C:\ prompt and builds up a huge packet
backlog.

(which will need us to wait for TX completions).

Added debug autocolourisation to netdevice.c

Call netdevice's poll() and transmit() methods only when device is open.

net_device is unregistered.

defined in vsprintf.h.  (This may change, since vsprintf.h is a
non-standard name, but for now it's the one to use.)

There should be no need to include vsprintf.h just for DBG() statements,
since include/compiler.h forces it in for a debug build anyway.

Added a large number of missing calls to free_pkb().  In the case of UDP,
no received packets were ever freed, which lead to memory exhaustion
remarkably quickly once pxelinux started up.

In general, any function with _rx() in its name which accepts a pk_buff
*must* either call free_pkb() or pass the pkb to another _rx() function
(e.g. the next layer up the stack).  Since the UDP (and TCP) layers don't
pass packet buffers up to the higher-layer protocols (the
"applications"), they must free the packet buffer after calling the
application's newdata() method.

default test to the DHCP test.

Kill off the static single net device and move to proper dynamic
registration (which we need with the new device model).

Break the (flawed) assumption that all network-layer protocols can use
ARP; such network-layer protocols (i.e. IPv4) must now register as an ARP
protocol using ARP_NET_PROTOCOL() and provide a single method for checking
the existence of a local network-layer address.

take ownership of the packet, rather than doing so only if they return
success.  This breaks semantic compatibility with Linux's
hard_start_xmit() method, but means that we don't have to worry so much
about error cases.

Split mechanism of processing received packets (net_rx_process()) out
from policy (net_step()), preparatory to putting net_step() in a separate
object.

implementation allows for only one, and does so without compromising on
the efficiency of static allocation).

Link-layer protocols are cleanly separated from the device drivers.

Network-layer protocols are cleanly separated from individual network
devices.

Link-layer and network-layer protocols are cleanly separated from each
other.