On Sat, Dec 19, 1998 at 03:22:55PM -0500, Thomas Riemer wrote:
> I've started working on the sii disk driver for the 2100.
>
> The whole industry of device drivers seem like a bizarre activity to me.
> Some thought questions:
> 1. Why does a person have to write a different device driver for each
> Unix variant?
> 2. Why does a person have to reinvent the handling routines for timers,
> and interrupt handling? (Or in my case cut and past from some other
> driver)
>
> 3. Wouldn't make a whole lot more sense to write a device
> driver generator - where you feed it a configuration file - and it
> generates the appropriate C driver code with
> the appropriate hardware specific code in the write places...
> i.e. be able to build in stats automatically instead of laboring over
> it enlessly? I would think this would amortize efforts on device
> drivers to a one time deal? I would think that netbsd, linux, freebsd
> and several other OS's could gain a great deal by having something
> like this....
>
> I'm I just totally crazy in thinking this way? Is there a forum(i.e.
> mailing list) that discusses this kind of thing?
The on ongoing approach in that direction is the UDI project being pushed by
SCO, HP and others. They're trying to tackle a real problem but I at least
technical they're approach is bad. They've been trying to convice the Linux
community as well but so far with rather limited success.
Ralf
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