cak@purdue.ARPA (Christopher A. Kent) (11/05/85)
The discussion of a more efficient TELNET protocol seems to pop up every six months or so; last time it was on TCP-IP. It's certainly possible to do a protocol along the lines of what LAT does -- bunch up characters for a time interval and send them as one packet, either a TCP segment or a UDP datagram. The problem seems to arrive in wanting to implement it in the kernel for efficiency (that's what we're after, after all) and the fact that there are so many products out there that won't understand the new protocol (how many commercial terminal muxes speak rlogin?). A compromise approach seems to be to move TELNET into the kernel. This would avoid all the context switches associated with the user-process server (at least two per character, possibly more), and might cut down on the TCP packets sent (because timing would be tighter, and ACKs could be more easily piggybacked.) chris ----------