--- /dev/null
+TODO After 1.0
+==============
+
+A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
+least could be done.
+
+ o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
+ lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
+
+ o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
+ it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
+ support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
+ package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
+ The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
+ This should be looked at more closely.
+
+ Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
+ the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
+ choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
+ I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
+ someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
+ to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
+ be checked.
+
+ Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
+ which I like more over OpenSSL package.
+
+ o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
+ SILC.
+
+ o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
+ in SILC.
+
+ o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
+ compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
+ defined.
+
+ o Optimizations in Libraries
+
+ o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
+ silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
+ dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
+ function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
+ SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
+ data is saved.
+
+ The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
+ structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
+ is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
+
+ The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
+ packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
+ it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
+ could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
+ until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
+ This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
+ quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
+
+ The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
+ interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
+ be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
+ silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
+ allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
+ usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
+ easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
+ quickly.
+
+ These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
+ but would take away many allocations that can be done several
+ times in a second.
+
+ o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
+ handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
+ in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
+ silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
+ handling routines, and create an interface where the application
+ can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
+ receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
+ we can move the data handling in one place.
+
+ o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
+ and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
+ with silc_id_payload_* functions.
+
+ o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely
+ redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by
+ doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN
+ macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since
+ it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding
+ SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save
+ totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer.
+
+ Add also perhaps function silc_buffer_alloc_size that would
+ effectively do:
+
+ return silc_buffer_pull_tail(silc_buffer_alloc(size),
+ size);
+
+ to not require the user to give the pull_tail anymore.
+
+ o Scheduler can be optimized for FD tasks by changing the fd_queue
+ to SilcHashTable instead of using linked list. We need to do
+ one-to-one mapping of FD to task and hash table is more efficient
+ for this usage.
+
+ Also redefine the silc_select to perhaps return a separate
+ structure of the events that actually occurred, instead of
+ returning the events in the fd_list which is then traversed
+ in the generic code to find the changed events. This can be
+ made faster by having own struct which includes only the
+ changed events, thus the tarversing is faster since the whole
+ fd_list is not traversed anymore (it is still traversed in the
+ silc_select but at least it removes one extra tarversing later
+ for the same list).
+
+ o Optimizations in Server
+
+ o Remove the big switch statement from the function
+ silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
+ table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
+ represents the packet type value.
+
+ Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
+ statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
+ done as well.
+
+ o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
+ all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
+ new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
+ and router packets the parser would be called immediately
+ instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
+ should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
+ actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
+
+ o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll
+ cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one
+ SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be
+ optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not
+ SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about
+ SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely).
+
+ o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes
+ callback as an argument must return SilcAsyncOperation.
+
+ o Add DSS support.
+
+ o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
+
+ o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
+ SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled
+ in separately.
projects / silc.git / blobdiff