[haiku-development] Re: FW: (Belated) answers to your questions...

On 11/6/07, Ben Allen <ben.allen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Nov 6, 2007 12:32 AM, Humdinger <humdingerb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 2007/11/6, Thom Holwerda slakje@xxxxxxxxxxx:
> >
> > > Back when QNX contacted me (under embargo) about opening up the QNX source
> > > code, I was very curious about the possibilities this would mean for Haiku
> > -
> > > mostly on the driver front.
> > --snip--
> >
> > That's nice... potentionally. :)
> > Has anyone had a look at QNX drivers? If not, why not? I'm just curious...
> > While sniffing around the QNX site, I found this "Master Chart for BSD
> > Licenses":
> > http://www.qnx.com/legal/licensing/dev_license/eula/tposltg1_04.html ,
> > listing various parts and license. Not some hidden treasure really. Maybe
> > it's useful for someone.
> >
> > Humdinger
>
> I have worked with QNX for the last several years of grad school,
> particularly in the area of drivers.  QNX doesn't have a wide array of
> drivers available for desktop systems (not compared to Linux/BSD, at
> least), but it does have drivers for many embedded devices that
> traditional operating systems don't support.  Due to the common UNIX
> heritage, many QNX drivers are simple ports of Linux drivers.
> However, since QNX is a real-time OS and is designed to run well on
> embedded devices with limited resources, many of the QNX drivers are
> highly optimized for memory usage and for speed (although sometimes at
> the expense of features).
>
> However, if there is a QNX driver available for a device not (yet)
> supported by Haiku, we can port it to Haiku much more easily than a
> driver from just about any other OS (IMHO).  QNX drivers (or "resource
> managers" as they call them) run as user space programs, not in the
> protected kernel space.  This makes developing and debugging drivers
> much easier, since a rogue driver can be killed and restarted like a
> normal program.  Also, QNX drivers tend to be much easier to read
> through and understand since they have little OS-related overhead and
> use most of the same standard POSIX features/functions as Linux.
>
> If there are any Haiku driver needs that can be filled with a driver
> from QNX, I would be happy to help port over the code.  My experience
> with BeOS/Haiku drivers is rather limited, but if my QNX driver
> experience is useful to anyone trying to port over a driver, drop me a
> line and I will be more than happy to help.
>
> -Ben

I'm quite interested in this. I've always liked QNX, and I wouldn't
mind getting familiar with its code.

What are the drivers available that are still not present in HAIKU ?

Salvo

-- 
Salvatore Benedetto (a.k.a. emitrax)
Student of Computer and Telecommunications Engineering
University of Messina (Italy)
www.messinalug.org

Please do not send me any word, excel or power point file
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

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