Before this commit, anything that touched RawSocket or TapInterface
worked partly by accident and partly because of a horrible crutch
that resulted in massive latencies as well as inevitable packet loss
every time an ARP request had to be issued. Also, there was no way
to use poll() other than by continuously calling it in a busy loop.
After this commit, poll() indicates when the earliest timer expires,
and so the caller can sleep until that moment (or until packets
arrive).
Note that there is a subtle problem remaining: every time poll()
is called, every socket with a pending outbound packet whose
IP address doesn't correspond to a MAC address will send a new
ARP request, resulting in potentially a whole lot of such requests.
ARP rate limiting is a separate topic though.
The use of this type has several drawbacks:
* It does not allow distinguishing between different error
conditions. In fact, we wrongly conflated some of them
before this commit.
* It does not allow propagation via ? and requires manual use
of map_err, which is especially tiresome for downstream code.
* It prevents us from expanding the set of error conditions
even if right now we have only one.
* It prevents us from blanket using Result<T> everywhere
(a nitpick at most).
Instead, use Result<T, Error> everywhere, and differentiate error
conditions where applicable.
Various parts of smoltcp require an arrow of time; a monotonically
increasing timestamp. Most obviously this is TCP sockets, but
the tracer and the pcap writer devices also benefit from having
timestamps. There are a few ways this could be implemented:
1. using a static Cell, global for the entire smoltcp crate;
2. using a static method on Device;
3. using an instance method on Device;
4. passing the current timestamp into *Interface::poll.
The first two options are undesirable because they create a notion
of global clock, and interfere e.g. with mocking.
The third option is undesirable because not all devices are
inherently tied to a particular clock, e.g. a loopback device isn't.
Therefore, the timestamp is injected into both sockets and devices
through the *Interface::poll method.
Dario Nieuwenhuis
jhwgh1968
Dan Robertson
Dan Robertson
whitequark
Philipp Oppermann
Steffen Butzer