WPANTUND support

[Tobías Lifschitz]

Hi everyone,

We were starting to develop an application using an EFR32 chip as NCP and a posix platform running wpantund to control the network interface. However from a recent PR ([agent] remove wpantund support #403) we noticed wpantund is being deprecated in favour of ot-daemon. Is this correct?

So we were wondering if using RCP instead of NCP, and having ot-daemon on Linux running OT would be a better long term solution in terms of compatibility and support. Does this architecture have clear advantages/disadvantages over the other one?

Thank you in advanced!

Tobías

[Yakun Xu]

Hi Tobías, 

Yes, RCP is recommended for border router. This architecture is simpler(both in design and implementation) as compared to the previous one. It provides the same CLI interface as the one in OpenThread(through the ot-ctl command). It also help reduce cost of the radio chip. However, the new architecture cannot support host sleep while Thread network still keeps running.

Regards

Yakun

[Anand M]

Hello Yakun,

I appreciate if you could provide answers to the following w.r.t WPANTUND support being taken off.

1. What does this deprecation of WPANTUND support mean for existing customers who have products based on NCP configuration?

2. Is there any kind of  strategy in place to keep this support open for a period of time until everyone switches themselves to this RCP configuration? 

3. And what kind of support can be expected for any for products which are RTOS based (non Linux) and using NCP as the configuration?

4. How does this RCP configuration would affect such RTOS based Border router products? I think it means porting the whole of openthread stack onto the new host controller choosen. 

Please share your thoughts.

Thanking you in advance,

Best Regards,

Anand

On 19-Aug-2020, at 2:56 AM, 'Yakun Xu' via openthread-users <openthre...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi Tobías, 

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[Yakun Xu]

Hi,

On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at 10:08:11 PM UTC+8 anand.ma...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello Yakun,

I appreciate if you could provide answers to the following w.r.t WPANTUND support being taken off.

1. What does this deprecation of WPANTUND support mean for existing customers who have products based on NCP configuration?

Since we don't have plans to do further development wpantund support in OpenThread Border Router project, no new features(Thread 1.2 and newer versions) will not be added, and no bug fixes are going to be provided.

2. Is there any kind of  strategy in place to keep this support open for a period of time until everyone switches themselves to this RCP configuration? 

The code is still on GitHub in a separate branch wpantund/master. People can continue using it.

3. And what kind of support can be expected for any for products which are RTOS based (non Linux) and using NCP as the configuration?

If the RTOS is running in the radio chip, ot-rtos can be a reference. If the RTOS is running in another chip, I think you may reference wpantund on how to communicate with NCP through spinel protocol. 

4. How does this RCP configuration would affect such RTOS based Border router products? I think it means porting the whole of openthread stack onto the new host controller choosen. 

Yes, https://github.com/openthread/ot-esp32 can be a reference.

[Robert B]

Hi,

as I now successfully managed to crosscompile and use ot-wpantund for my target and planned to use wpantund in a project, I found this conversation by accident and need some clarification:

Do you stop the support of wpantund in the ot-br-posix project but further development/maintenance of the wpantund-project will continue?

or 

Do you stop development/maintenance of wpantund generally ?

Best Regards

Robert

[Jonathan Hui]

We are continuing to maintain wpantund and it is included in our continuous integration checks. However, we are not actively driving new features into wpantund.

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Jonathan Hui

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