Thanks for your input Thomas. I have spent the day getting this
working on a virtual Debian system -- and I specifically picked 32bit
system because I was having issues with 64 bit, and your description
of what is going on there makes perfect sense. Since it is running in
as a guest OS on my mac, I simply point the emulated serial port at
direwolf on a raspberry pi in my garage hooked to a radio and
soundcard. It works flawlessly. I understand it lacks some newer
AX.25 features, but running like this it can open up a world of
possibilities with retro fun. That is all the software that is
looking for a hostmode TNC. I do have real hostmode TNC's, but
direwolf is a little bit better and with a digirig + pi, it is even
more compact.
If I run a windows xp guest in qemu or virtbox, I can have the serial
port point to TFKISS, and I am off to the races with WinFBB, DOSFBB,
or WinPac2.8 (or whatever cool stuff is out there that needs TF2.7b).
Programs looking for WA8DED hostmode proms should work as well as
TF2.7b is just an extension of this hoslmode firmware.
I was looking at it primarily for LinFBB a while back because I wanted
to use direwolf with it, and the AX.25 stack in Linux was broken. Now
that is fixed the importance of it diminishes slightly. It would be
cool for someone to write a hostmode stack that DED compatible from
scratch, but I do not have that much knowledge. I can cludge/hack and
fix things with my own patches a little, but not a wiz bang
programmer.
-73 de Chris KQ6UP
On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 6:14?PM Thomas Leibold via groups.io
<leibold@...> wrote:
Hi Chris,
There is a program called TFKISS, but it needs to be ported to a more current version of Linux.
I found two source versions of TFKISS and some more in binary form only. It appears that the authors (from Nord<>Link in Germany) had problems with copyright violations (it is mentioned in the documentation) and possibly stopped publishing source code as a result.
The two versions of code are apparently both from a common ancestor 2.7b dated 10/5/1996.
The first is the port of "The Firmware" from firmware code (to be installed on a TNC-2 compatible hardware TNC) to application software running on Linux.
The second is a version that at some point was released for (or with) OpenBSD and differs from the first mainly through the addition of the configure system with support for Linux, Solaris, NetBSD.
The software compiles and runs on Linux without any modifications (yes, even modern Linux), as long as it is being compiled as a 32-bit application (use the -m32 flag when compiling it on a 64-bit platform). The code is full of pointer to/from integer conversions that can greatly optimize code (when the target is a tiny EPROM) but extremely problematic when those pointers are suddenly 64-bit long!
For use with Direwolf I was unsuccessful in establishing an IP socket connection (tfkiss_extsocket 127.0.0.1:8001). It later turned out that this option doesn't do what I thought it is for (TCP/IP socket connection to a KISS TNC, like Direwolf). However using the pseudo-tty option (-p) in Direwolf, I was able to specify "device /tmp/kisstnc" in the tfkiss.ini file and run tfkiss with Direwolf.
I also played with tfkiss with a hardware KISS TNC over a real serial port and that worked just fine too.
Or at very least provide a UNIX socket like /tmp/tnc0 for TFKISS to connect to.
While a Unix domain socket would provide an additional method for guest applications to connect to Direwolf, I don't think that it would be beneficial in this case:
- the -p (pseudo-ttty/terminal) option is already available and works.
- a UNIX domain socket option would probably have the same problem as the pseudo-tty option (blocking when nobody is reading the data sent to it).
The correct approach (in my opinion) would be to make tfkiss use the TCP/IP socket to connect to Direwolf's KISS network port.
While tfkiss is functional by itself, it appears its main purpose was to be a compatibility layer between a KISS modem and other client software, especially TNT from the same group. When used as a compatibility layer, the tfkiss_extsocket port is what applications like TNT can connect to. Unlike tfkiss (which is usable but not very user-friendly), TNT is/was a full-featured packet communications package (but I haven't tried that software yet).
While it may not take much effort to implement a KISS socket connection in tfkiss (to connect to Direwolf), it may not be the best way to spend your time. The tfkiss software is dated and while it implements AX.25 version 2.0, it does not implement any of the level 2 enhancements such as larger packet sizes (for 9600 baud or faster packet) or improved error handling (selective reject of only bad packets instead of *all* unacknowledged packets). Nor does it support FX.25 forward error correction. I'm fairly certain that it would be less effort to write new software from scratch than trying to bring tfkiss up to current standards.
73,
Thomas
KK6FPP
--
Thanks,
Chris Maness
Steven
Jake KK7HAQ
Georges WH6AZ
Josh MacDonald
