Subject: Alpine: a new protocol development tool

From: David Ely <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 15:13:51 -0700 (PDT)

Over the past few months I've been working with David Wetherall and
Stefan Savage on a tool that allows an unaltered kernel networking
stack to run in a user-level library.  It's called Alpine
(Application-Level Protocol Infrastructure for Network
Experimentation).

Probably the most unique feature of this package is that an alternate
network stack can be used and/or debugged without modifying either the
kernel or any application binaries.  Developing protocols at
user-level is much easier than traditional kernel develop because
source-level debugging is available and no reboots are required
between revisions.

It has turned out to be a useful tool for us, so I thought some of you
might also benefit from using it.  It's currently only available for
FreeBSD 3.x on Intel x86 platforms.  This is an alpha release, and
there are bound to be things that don't work perfectly.  Please email
me if you run into any problems.  I will do my best to correct them.

Check out http://alpine.cs.washington.edu/ for more information. 

Cheers,

David

P.S.  I will be at SIGCOMM next week if you're interested in talking
to me about Alpine.

---

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 22:54:12 GMT

*> 
  *> Over the past few months I've been working with David Wetherall and
  *> Stefan Savage on a tool that allows an unaltered kernel networking
  *> stack to run in a user-level library.  It's called Alpine
  *> (Application-Level Protocol Infrastructure for Network
  *> Experimentation).
  *> 
  *> Probably the most unique feature of this package is that an alternate
  *> network stack can be used and/or debugged without modifying either the
  *> kernel or any application binaries.  Developing protocols at
  *> user-level is much easier than traditional kernel develop because
  *> source-level debugging is available and no reboots are required
  *> between revisions.
  *> 

A very useful technique.  There is NO WAY I could have ever developed
and debugged T/TCP without doing this for BSD Unix.

Bob Brade