Put another way, it would be far more compatible if this were done over an IP stream rather than any native ethernet stream, not least it could use any ethernet driver that linux supports rather than a small subset of them. I am sure this will make a lot of the lower layer people turn away from the project which is unfortunate but there are a lot of issues associated with attempting to do this over a native ethernet connection: it would need some consideration to be given to data loss and recovery which are already native to the higher layers. Perhaps the project needs to be specified with regards to its goals? If the idea is just to have Ethernet supported as an interface then fine, native access is probably fine. If the idea is to have Ethernet supported as a transport the reusing what is already available makes a lot of sense. To start with, being able to use any Ethernet card already means it can be done cheaply. Limiting it to selected devices perhaps not so as it would require the purchase of specific cards. Anyway, to paraphrase a joke a friend made recently, he drove to a Linux Audio Conference where the people there said to him "what are those round things on the side of your car?". He said at least when we went to the networking conferences people knowingly said "ah, I know what _they_ are. They're called wheels..... I've seen those before." Kind regards, nick _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live: Friends get your Flickr, Yelp, and Digg updates when they e-mail you. http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/windows/windowslive/see-it-in-action/so…