TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
===========================
- o make install copies the symblic links from lib/silcsim/ and not
- modules.
-
o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
is not actually async currently.
TODO After 1.0
==============
- o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
- compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
- defined. zlib package is already included into the lib dir (in CVS,
- not in distribution), but it is not used yet, and it requires some
- tweaking on the Makefiles (we want static lib not shared).
+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 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.
-
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
Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
which I like more over OpenSSL package.
- o SSH2 public keys support.
+ o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
+ SILC.
- o OpenPGP certificate support.
+ 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 Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
+ functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
+ take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
+ final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
+ registered protocols.
+
+ 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 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 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.