Moinak Ghosh <moin...@belenix.org> wrote:
> Linux Driver porting is sufficiently challenging since there is zero
> similarity between the internal kernel ABIs of the two OSes. Even
> behavioral semantics are different. In addition stacks like USB3 and
> bluetooth are missing.
Correct and in addition, the VFS interface from Linux is completely different.
Also the philosophy behind setting up DMA on Linux is completely different and
causes problems inside Linux already.
> These are non-trivial and complicated by the fact that not all devices
> behave strictly as per the standard. Scores of device variants need
> to be tested, idiosyncracies addressed etc. Biggest of all debugging
> in the kernel space is an art by itself. Sometimes one will have to
> forget about life to get something working.
The only thing we could take from Linux drivers is _some_ ideas on dealing with
the hardware.
Both SunOS and recent *BSDs are based on the driver interface from BSD-4.2
(except that SunOS introduced a streams based network stack in the late 1980s).
_porting_ drivers is possible with drivers from the *BSD group but taking a
driver from Linux requires more than what I would call porting.
Jörg
--
EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
_______________________________________________
belenix-dev mailing list
belenix-dev@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-dev
