[olpc-software] [Fwd: Re: [avahi] scalability of avahi (or mdns-sd in genera

[Christopher Blizzard]

Krishna Sankar wrote:
>>> D) Unless we are leveraging the bus for other functionalities, avahi 
>>> *might* be slightly heavyweight; we might have to implement 
>> ZeroConf on the bare metal
>>
>> Not sure why this is.
>>  
> <KS>
> Couple of points : One of my concern was the DBUS (may be not a valid 
> concern, especially if we are leveraging the DBUS in OLPC). Second,
> because of the various constraints, the ZeroConf might have to be aware
> of the underlying mesh substrate. For example your thought of 'use mDNS
> for 2 hops' is a good optimization, but what if one really needs to
> publish to a network that has higher diameter ? May be ZeroConf does a
> re-publish. I am postulating. As Jim pointed out in one of the e-mails,
> the NS2 simulations would not help us here; we really need to
> "experience" the mesh substrate through the apps that ride the Zeroconf.
> May be a collaborative piano app would need > 2 hops. One thing is
> certain - we need a few good knobs and counters, so that we can tune the
> substrates to fit the layer 7 apps, naturally under the covers.

Yeah, we're using dbus.  dbus + zeroconf + avahi makes it _incredibly_ 
easy to write an app.  But, yeah, testing is key.  We'll have to start 
testing it out pretty soon.

--Chris