Hi all,
I have a problem related to decoding for which I have a solution. I'd
appreciate it if you could give me feedback on the proposal and suggest better
alternatives, if possible.
The basic problem has to do with marking a frame as a "Malformed Frame". It is
possible with the MDS family of switches & analyzer adapters to truncate frames
delivered to Ethereal to prevent fewer frame drops and for other
reasons. Separately, in SCSI, an initiator may allocate fewer bytes than
required to return a response. For example, a normal INQUIRY response is about
48 bytes long, but there are lots of cases where hosts allocate as few as 4
bytes. In each of these cases, the frame is smaller than normal. Marking such
frames as "Malformed" seems to cause confusion and affects viewing experience
according to the feedback that I've received.
It would be slow and bad for readability to check for every field if there are
sufficient bytes present. What I was thinking was to instead add a field to the
packet_info structure called "truncated". If this bit is set, instead of
marking a frame as malformed when an exception is thrown, we should mark the
frame as "truncated".
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I'll make the relevant changes and
hope to check it in before the upcoming release, if the changes are simple
enough.
Thanks,
Dinesh
--
I am not young enough to know everything. - Oscar Wilde