[openbeos] Re: Speaking of drivers
- From: Rich Heidorn <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 11:07:50 -0600
Mark-Jan Bastian wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>
Well, if you are going to go as far as creating special tools to compare
the changes from a source level, maybe it would be beneficial to try and
create a wrapper driver (same type of setup that is used for BeOS drivers)
that will wrap an existing linux driver. I don't know enough about linux
drivers to know whether this is possible, but i'm sure some of you more
knowledgeable folks could tell us that.
--
Rich Heidorn (justsquire)
Other related posts:
