Re: NetBSD drivers on HURD?

[wgrim]

Okay, I'm trying to take all that in.  I've started putting together a
requirements analysis of what needs to be achieved to have a working deva/ddm
(device driver managers) implementation.

I had one question though...

When looking at the original deva/fabrica outline in the GNU/Hurd-L4 2003
document, I noticed that a lot of device managers could be loaded.  Was the
original reasoning behind this so that normal users could load their own device
managers, or was it because the superuser may run different device driver
managers for different classifications of devices?

Thanks!

--Mike

Quoting Daniel Wagner <address@hidden>:

> > When it comes to libfthread, I haven't really looked at it much.  To tell
> > the truth, I haven't looked at deva/fabrica's code much, because I am
> > trying to understand the core part of the Hurd/L4 first.  However, if it's
> > a threading library, wouldn't it make more sense to put threading calls
> > into deva and have deva make the appropriate threading calls on each OS, or
> > is libfthread necessary to create a faster version of threading for the
> > purpose of the device drivers?
>
> The threading library provides a nicer/richer interface to the deva
> interfaces. Basically, you need to talk to the deva server from your drivers.
> This communication can be wrapped with the threading library. Note, that the
> calls to create new threads etc were also planned to go through deva to end
> up in the OS. What you described is what the library should have been...
>
>
> > I'm basically trying to understand about a couple things in order to reach
> > a possible compromise in the design:
> > 1) If I create the threading library, I'll have to make it work on multiple
> > architectures, doing essentially parallel work to most OS out there.  Is it
> > worth me doing that?
>
> If you want to have drivers for other OSes this makes sens. If you want to
> support only Hurd/L4 the answer is no.
>
> > 2) Does libfthread offer an advantage over normal OS threading libraries?
>
> Yes, you don't need everything, you can use a very lightweight version which
> is optimised for driver use (whatever that means).
>
> daniel
>



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