On Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:01:15 -0800 "Hua Zhong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I think allowing binary hardware drivers in userspace hurts > > our ability to leverage companies to release hardware specs. > > If filesystems can be in user space, why can't drivers be in user space? On > what *technical* ground? The FUSE file system interface provides a clean disciplined interface which allows an fs to live in user space. The uio layer (if its ever fixed and cleaned up) provides some basic hooks that allow a user space program to arbitarily control hardware and make a nasty undebuggable mess. uio also doesn't handle hotplug, pci and other "small" matters. Now if you wanted to make uio useful at minimum you would need - PCI support - The ability to mark sets of I/O addresses for the card as "unmappable", "read only", "read-write", "any read/root write", "root read/write" - A proper IRQ handler - A DMA interface - The ability to describe sharing rules Which actually is a description of the core of the DRM layer. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/