You can sign kernel driver by using kmodsign.  I think that you could add new network protocols to the kernel without re-compiling.  Google it.   

I Googled it and now learned some things about kernel development. 

Tim
From: John Forecast <john@forecast.name>
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2023 10:59 PM
To: The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list <hecnet@lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: Announcing new release of Linux DECnet
 
Hi Dan,
   From the network receive/transmit side that would certainly be possible with minimal, if any, kernel changes. Unfortunately you still have to worry about the application APIs (connect(), accept(), read(), write() etc) and there is no easy way to hoist them into userspace without substantial kernel changes. You would need something similar to FUSE.

  John.

> On Oct 25, 2023, at 10:31 PM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 10:50 PM John Forecast <john@forecast.name> wrote:
>> Sometime around mid-2022 the Linux kernel developers decided to remove the DECnet code from the Linux
>> kernel. Kernel 6.0.x was the last release which included source code for a DECnet implementation. More
>> recently, there has been some discussion around removing the code from the Long Term Support kernels.
>>
>> These changes mean that the repository I have been maintaining at
>> <https://github.com/JohnForecast/RaspbianDECnet> can no longer be installed on recent releases.
>>
>> Over the past year or so, I have been working on a replacement for this repository with the following
>> characteristics:
>>
>>        - Designed to be built as an external kernel module
>
> John, forgive me if this question is obtuse, but I'm curious: is there
> any reason this couldn't be hoisted entirely into userspace and built
> using TAP/TUN, which would put a (relatively) clean interface between
> DECnet and the kernel?
>
>        - Dan C.
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