> But take note of Haiku's move to make their OS capable of using *BSD drivers. > > That sort of adapter layer seems worthwhile, even if the results do not > initially approach 'native' performance. > > *After* the dust settles (who woulda thunk, on apparent 'merit' or lack > thereof, > that the dodgy Realtek silicon would ever have become soooo ubiquitous?) > > ..THEN 'native' drivers could be gone after for the much smaller subset of > 'common survivors'. IOW, better a slow, or feature-stripped driver than none > at > all.
i have known about haiku (and a few other oses) using bsd drivers. i'm sure that most everyone who writes drivesrs for plan 9 knows about this too. one of the chief advantages of plan 9 is that it can be understood by one person. if you drag sk_bufs and all that other goo into the kernel, you dimish one of plan 9's chief advantages by a considerable amount. also there is a lot to be gained by writing one's own driver. it pays to understand the hardware, especially if you depend on it. you may have to fix some critical bugs. i know some of the hardware that coraid uses has some fixes that i know linux does not have. useless observation: it's fun to see the linux guys bragging about how their drivers are so small. bsd drivers are typically half their size. plan 9 drivers are typically half again as large. to be fair, plan 9 drivers typicall give up things like tso. - erik
