On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> On Thursday 05 April 2007 08:14, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote: > > On 4/5/07, Vinzent Hoefler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > And it would mean writing a C to Pascal conversion of an ever > > > changing kernel interface. > > > > All interfaces change when a new version is released, > > Well, I was not talking about justified "architectural" changes (like > those from 2.4 to 2.6), but rather about those deliberate changes of > the Linux driver ABI sometimes from kernel patch to kernel patch where > important structures get reordered and such stuff. Without the actual C > macros you are lost. And yes, it's done on purpose to discourage the > use of binary only drivers. Additionally it discourages the use of > other languages than C when writing device drivers. I did one in Ada a > couple of years ago, but trying that these days would be close to > suicide or at least get you to the madhouse. ;) The solution is rather simple, it seems to me: write a small C driver stub which exposes a uniform interface. All you need to do is recompile this driver stub, and you're all set: the stuff that links to this stub will still function. I think the paragon filesystem driver works like this, and I would not be surprised if the vmware modules and nvidea drivers work like this too. Could be too naive to be true, of course. Michael. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
