[openbeos] Re: Driver Tutorial

On 9/17/06, Mathew Schofield <mr.skoe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


If you provide developers with excellent tutorials, they will come.
I'm thinking more along the lines of:
- A Tutorial on How the Graphics Driver is put together (E.g. like Rudolfs
one).
- A Tutorial on How Network Hardware works (E.g. Keywords like PHY,
MAC, MII, etc).
- A Tutorial on How Sound Drivers are put together
- A Basic tutorial on Registers, IO Space, ISA/PCI/AGP/PCI-E/USB Bus
Interfaces, ...
etc. etc.




I completely agree.  As an electrical engineer who has ported drivers from
various OSes to Linux and QNX, I can testify that the most aggravating and
difficult part of the porting process can be interfacing the driver with the
kernel/OS.  All the hardware communication code is usually OS agnostic (for
the most part), and the porter will spend most of their time messing with
the driver/OS interface code.  Having detailed, easy to understand
documentation as well as examples of simple drivers for both real and
virtual devices (like /dev/null) makes a world of difference.  (QNX is much
better about this than Linux, and as a result, drivers that took me over a
month to port to Linux were ported to QNX in about a week and with much less
stess).

-Ben

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