> Actually I think in this case the PPP driver should really hold onto
> outgoing packets and keep retrying (with some limit, say 16 attempts,
> much like many modern ethernet cards limit collision retries) the send
> if character errors/drops are hit, much like ethernet does in hardware
> for collisions.
The thing is, with ethernet the transmitter knows if there was a
collision, and so it can retransmit. With PPP, the main cause of
errors is serial port receive overruns, and there is no way for the
transmitter to know about them without some sort of additional
protocol. I can't think of any errors that the serial port can
actually detect on the transmit side.
There is an RFC for "PPP Reliable Transmission" which basically
amounts to using the ISO LAPB protocol over the link. It seems
preferable to me to keep the link layer simple and let the TCP layer
do the retransmissions, though.
Paul.
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