FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Speaking of drivers

[Mark-Jan Bastian <markjan@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 04:26:24PM +0100, Sebastian Nozzi wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> as a non-os-internals-stuff person, something has allways intrigued me:
> 
> would it be possible for an OS like OBOS to take advantage and use all the
> device drivers available for, say, Linux?

I'd say, look at the linux source for that particular driver, see how the 
meat works, and use the meat & docs carefully to create a clean driver 
using the driver framework of NewOS / OBOS. In short, a fork of a part of 
of linux kernel driver source.

Linux drivers take arguments, need a special order in which they are 
insmodded, and export and import a lot of functions, and their API's are 
very different. I hope NewOS wouldn't even need insmod or driver 
arguments at boot/loadtime - the driversettings API can be used instead,
and on-demand loaded modules can provide higher level services like 1394 
or USB bus managment.

Altough, it would be nice if there were tools at some point that can 
compare the changes of a certain linux kernel's drivers against a 
sourcebase of NewOS drivers, so that a NewOS maintainer can see how this 
new linux release would affect a NewOS fork of the same drivers, 
and apply the changes one for one, in a clean way, taking into account
the rules for drivers of the NewOS.

Mark-Jan