[Ovmsdev] A promiscous wifi client

[Stephen Casner]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2017, Mark Webb-Johnson wrote:

> We don't seem to have this issue with the webserver listener; that
> uses mongoose (in netmanager). That doesn't have long-lived client
> side connections, but the socket listen/accept functionality should
> be similar. Not sure how mongoose handles it internally, but the
> library seems quite robust.

Mongoose wakes up from the select() periodically to do polling so the
deletion of the task would not happen while in select().

> I'm wondering if we can migrate to use that? It would probably save
> a bunch of ram (as it doesn't need a task for each thread). We are
> mostly single-user anyway.

I have converted console_telnet to use mongoose and netmanager in the
same manner as ovms_webserver.  This eliminates the TelnetServer and
TelnetReceiver tasks and saves about 3KB.  I have kept TelnetConsole
as a separate task from NetManTask.  I'm not convinced that combining
the console functionality into NetManTask is a good idea; I'm afraid
it would introduce some problems with interference between various
operations and may get into trouble with the Log() mechanism.  Even if
not, much more surgery would be required.

> Perhaps a generic extension to ovms_netmanager where you give it a
> tcp port and an object type. Then, it listens on that port and
> launches objects of that type (pre-configured to receive mongoose
> events as appropriate) for each new connection? Have a base virtual
> connection class, that gets inherited by each implementation (ssh,
> telnet, etc).

I didn't do it that way for this telnet conversion, but we could
evolve to that if appropriate.

Converting ssh may be possible but would be significantly harder.  The
libtelnet design calls for all the actual I/O (recv/send) to be done
outside of the library.  That fits with the design of mongoose where
it owns that I/O.  However, the wolfssh library is designed for the
library itself to be in control of the I/O.

                                                        -- Steve