[Nfd-dev] Wondering about NFD on Windows...

[Davide Pesavento]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 6:02 PM Gusev, Peter <peter at remap.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi devs,
>
> I’m wondering about feasibility of building/using NDN application on Windows.

Counter-question: why? :)

> I see that the very first attempt to run NFD on windows was abandoned due to huge amount of work required to port the code.
> The more feasible solution seem to be using WSL. I’d like to clarify few things regarding that:
>
> - does anyone know whether ethernet faces (specifically L2 multicast) support is now available on WSL?

I think you can safely assume they're still unsupported. This
essentially depends on Microsoft implementing AF_PACKET support in
WSL, or libpcap adding some magic way to capture and inject packets in
WSL, neither of which seems to be happening any time soon.

> - if I have an app outside WSL that tries to connect to NFD locally, will it fail? (i guess it will, since there should be an issue with connecting over Unix socket which is non-existent on win64). what could be the steps to make this app work with NFD (connect over udp/tcp to localhost)? will I also need to port NDN libraries to windows?

I read somewhere that Windows is adding Unix socket support (not sure
when). In the meantime, I suppose you can use a TCP connection to the
forwarder. I don't know how IP-based services running over WSL are
exposed to the host system though... is WSL like a container? does it
have a different IP address? If so, there may be some additional
obstacles but there are workarounds (e.g. face_system.tcp.local in
nfd.conf).

And yes, if your app runs natively on Windows, you need an NDN library
for Windows.

Best,
Davide