[Coco] Tcp off-loading on CoCo

[Brett Gordon]

On Apr 9, 2017 12:51 PM, "William Astle" <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:

How many of us are going to use web browsers running on the Coco,
realistically? Probably not many. It's really something of a whistling dog
situation. (And, the javascript and graphical requirements to use many of
those sites are pretty heavy anyway.) The same goes for email access using
POP3/IMAP/SMTP.

:)  ahh..you know me: I love whistling dogs! :)

>
> Basically, the point of this is that TCP offload is still a good idea. If
you can somehow offload the crypto stuff in a useful way (it can be turned
on and off mid-stream), too, that would likely also be helpful. The crypto
offload need not be the same device, though.

Yeah.  I agree.  And I like your take of providing TLS as an "offloaded
lib" if you will.  I have looked into to mbed system.  I feel the AES
cipher may be doable on the coco, but RSH (or whatever) that does the
initial setup would be comically slow...maybe it would even timeout the
secure server to reject us. :(

My treating TLS as some sort of osi layer was over-simplified to present my
idea easier. :)

I dont have any experience with the hardware options that exist between say
a raspi and a lowly clpd.

I guess speed of getting info in and out of the coco is (or will be)
important.  Trad. uarts, even modern ones, are still slow (and laggy).   I
guess it depends on what chip/board we're trying to use for offloading.  A
raspi has a eth port,  a fgpa has some pins.  a uC might have some spi or
i2c bus etc...

brett