IMO, compromising on quality, scalability, or maintainability, even to quickly get desktop hardware support equivalent to that of some other OS, is a mistake. And it shouldn't be necessary; if there were some way to find out which drivers that Linux has and Solaris doesn't are the ones people wanted the most (which would probably only be a few, not all of them), and get some people familiar with driver writing on other Unix-like OS's up to speed on Solaris driver writing, it shouldn't take long to get them done natively.
What's missing isn't so much drivers (although that's certainly what the user notices!), in the long run, it's information: what do they want, what are the specs for the hardware, what are the resources to train driver writers, what examples are out there, what can be done to solve the long-term problem (which is process, not number of drivers), and so on. If everyone that's worked on an open-source driver for Solaris (inside and outside of Sun) in the last say three years, contributed to a "lessons learned" wiki or somesuch, and the [Open]Solaris folks looked at Linux more not for code but to see what particular drivers and timespan for coming up with new ones that they have that people want, and some people worked to turn all that information plus all the info on driver writing for Solaris that's already out there into something coherent and comprehensive, I think it would be a huge resource just short of a plan and boilerplate for getting the job done. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
