[openbeos] Re: device drivers
- From: "Ithamar R. Adema" <ithamar@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 13:01:46 +0100
Hi Mark-Jan,
>I had a quick look at the plans of OpenBeos, and was wondering
>if anyone has taken up the challenge to create a device driver
>subsystem for the NewOS kernel, that is very BeOS-like =3F
>Like a seperate root filesystem, a seperate device filesystem
>mounted on top of that, and a way to use the BFS filesystem,
>system and ~/config dirs to find new device drivers and publish
>them.
Well, Travis has :) He has created an initial setup for a BeOS driver
compatibility layer in NewOS. IF you retrieve the sources of NewOS,
you'll find it in newos/kernel/dev/beos.c. If you hack newos/boot/arch/
i386/config.ini to include the speaker driver from BeOS (for details,
see newos.sf.net), it'll load the BeOS speaker driver and publish it in
the newos /dev directory. So yes, some level of driver compatibility
seems to be working, and will probably be expanded.
>I the goal of the openbeos team to provide binary compatibility
>of the module/busmanager/driver level too =3F
Yes and no. We'll try to keep as much drivers working as possible, but
we'll also see how much of the current BeOS drivers can be replaced
with "native" NewOS drivers. In the end, we want the sources of the
=5Fwhole=5F OS, and this includes drivers. However, some driver (nVidia
comes to mind) will be pretty hard to implement, without the specs
being widely available. I guess quite some work will be put into the
BeOS driver compatibility layer, but no guarenties are made at this
point.
Regards,
Ithamar.
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