Re: userspace drivers

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 06:48:01PM +0100, Niels Möller wrote:
> I mean, one can start designing a framework and discuss for months
> what's the best way of organizing things (see the networking
> discussion we had a while back). And given the framework, one can
> start writing drivers. That approach may work fine if the involved
> people have a lot of experience in doing the kind of stuff that the
> framework is supposed to support.

Peter has already written device drivers for embedded Linux, and actually
has a lot of experience on how to write device drivers portably (he is
actually giving a talk at FOSDEM about it, he announced this on this list).

A proper driver framework is critical for extensibility and performance. 
The write a few drivers first and then fix it later is how Linus did it,
and look at the result.  They are still changing and changing the framework,
and always have to fix all those drivers to follow these changes.  All these
changes have to be done manually, and require testing.  That consumes a lot
of resources.  We don't need to start at the point Linus did, we can learn
from other people's work and thus have a head start at a proper solution.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/