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Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] ethereal blocking when there is no traffic

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 17:44:56 -0800 (PST)
> I noticed that in modified pcap-linux.c, when there is no data we just 
> return(0) and didn't use the callback functions :
> 
> (*callback)(user, &h1, bp).

The callback routine is to be used to pass data to the callback routine;
if there's no data, you can't pass data to it, so you can't call it
back....

The loop for Ethereal when it's capturing packets does

    while (gtk_events_pending()) gtk_main_iteration();
    inpkts = pcap_dispatch(pch, 1, capture_pcap_cb, (u_char *) &ld);

which processes any GTK+ events (input, etc.) and then blocks waiting
for a packet to arrive or for the "libpcap" timeout to end.

"pcap_dispatch()" should be doing:

        return (pcap_read(p, cnt, callback, user));

as this was opened with "pcap_open_live()"; the patched Linux
"pcap_read()" should be doing a "select()" with the timeout specified in
the "pcap_open_live()" call - if the timeout goes off, and there's
nothing to be read from the descriptor for the SOCK_PACKET socket,
"select()" should return 0, and "pcap_read()" should return.

"pcap_dispatch()" should then return, and Ethereal should update the
packet counts if it's been a second since the last update, should sync
out any new packets written - but there shouldn't be any, as the
"select()" would've timed out - and should then go back to the beginning
of the loop to do

    while (gtk_events_pending()) gtk_main_iteration();
    inpkts = pcap_dispatch(pch, 1, capture_pcap_cb, (u_char *) &ld);

again.