Am Donnerstag, 14. Dezember 2006 12:14 schrieb Alan: > 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.
You think it's easier for a manufacturer of industrial IO cards to debug a (large) kernel module? > > uio also doesn't handle hotplug, pci and other "small" matters. uio is supposed to be a very thin layer. Hotplug and PCI are already handled by other subsystems. > > Now if you wanted to make uio useful at minimum you would need > The majority of industrial IO cards have registers and/or dual port RAM that can be mapped to user space (even today). We want to add a simple way to handle interrupts for such cards. That's all. The fact that there might be some sort of hardware/interrupts/situations where this is not possible or not so simple isn't that important at the moment. We can extend the UIO system if somebody actually requires these extensions. Hans - 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/
