Am I wasting my time even thinking this way?

[Luke Diamand <luke%diamand.org@localhost>]

Hi!

I wonder if I could ask people's advice about the NetBSD IP stack,
please?

The company I work for (Virata) develop a range of products (mainly DSL
modems) that need an IP stack. So many years ago someone wrote one. 

But now we find that our aged and trusty IP stack is no longer up to the
job. We would dearly like a number of features we really do not wish to
implement ourselves.

Obviously the easy solution is to go to someone like RouterWare and buy
their (no doubt excellent) IP stack. This is very tempting.

But an alternative would be to try to port the NetBSD stack to our
proprietary operating system (no - before you ask, switching to NetBSD
in toto is simply too daunting to consider).

So:-

*  Is this a totally evil thing to do in the first place?
*  Will we struggle on an ARM7? If we don't have an MMU? 
*  Will we get good performance (who wants a slow router?)
*  Will we struggle to disentangle the IP stack from the OS?


Thanks in advance for any opinions, 

Luke Diamand