HDLC - Char or Network driver?

[Goddeeris Frederic]

Hi,

I need to exchange data between an MPC860 and other components over an HDLC
bus. I found a "PPP over HDLC" driver for the MPC850. Out of this I made a
(quick and dirty) new driver for HDLC and it seems to work so I will be able
to make a nice driver out of this but I am unsure whether this needs to be
char driver of a network driver.

>From an application I need to send and receive native HDLC packets, so no
additional protocol is needed.

All examples and documents I find about network-drivers are so IP-related. A
network driver registers itself but how can an application reach it? An
Ethernet driver seems to be linked to the TCP/IP stack by using ifconfig.
But what about an HDLC driver for example?

I posted a similar question before to a news-group and several people
suggested that I write a char-driver. When you write to it, you send a HDLC
packet, when you read from it you get the packets that where received. My
temporary quick-and-dirty driver now is a char-driver. But I still feel a
bit uncomfortable about it.

How would you approach this?

Thanks,
Frederic


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