Re: drivers for l4-hurd

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 03:30:46PM +0100, Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek wrote:
> Imho the translators should be configured passively so that they are started
> when the device is needed.

I don't actually think you should start with filesystem integration here. 
Adding filesystem interfaces to a device driver is opening a large can of
worms, and you don't really want to worry about that.  Look at the proc
server, it doesn't provide any filesystem interface, although it arguably
could (/proc anyone?).

You definitely don't want to actually go through several process and
filesystem layers in the communication.  Look at how careful libstore is
written to not really go through /dev/hd0s1 etc in accessing the filesystem
data.

Just a word of warning so that you don't fall for the old "if you only have
a hammer, everything looks like a nail" trap.  Certainly you can make it
look like a filesystem, but that doesn't mean it is useful or feasible.

In fact, I would think that for some things (Bus driver + device drivers)
it's easier to have it all in one driver program with maybe dynamically
loadable shared object modules.

Thanks,
Marcus

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Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
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