On Aug 17, 2011, at 7:58 AM, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 11:04:30AM -0700, Mat Gara wrote:
>
>> Additionally in the future we want to make this dissector easily configurable so that hardware providers could add support for dissecting their custom register reads. To do this we want to make use of XML configuration files and hence we would need to make use of an XML parser in this dissector.
We already have XML configuration files for the DIAMETER and WiMAX ASN Control Plane protocols; they use Flex to scan the XML.
>> One xml parser we have been experimenting with is Expat. What would it take to integrate Expat support into wireshark?
The first thing it requires is Expat working on all the versions of UN*X on which Wireshark works, as well as 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Given that their home page:
http://expat.sourceforge.net/
speaks of fixes to make it build on "HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris 9", it'll probably work on all the UN*Xes in question; they also mention Windows, but don't say anything about Win64.
> Does it really make sense to do something like this? Why not add the code directly
> into Wireshark. For one, interpreting stuff at runtime is bad performance wise,
How much of the work is done at capture-parsing time rather than just being done at startup time?
> also it will be nice to have support in Wireshark for as many product specific
> extensions as possible.
They could contribute XML files to Wireshark.