On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 12:03 -0200, Fausto Carvalho Marques Silva wrote: > Hi folks, > i have an old dout about the fingerprint scanner support in the linux > world. > Why does the fingerprint scanners drivers are all written in the user > space with libusb and > not in the kernel space? It would be more easy to configure in ".config" > and wide availble if > it were in the kernel configuration. Many other things seens to be > inside the kernel but not > fingerprint scanners. Do you have any explanation for this (historical > or technical?
Simple. Most USB devices with custom protocols are implemented in user-space because it means that you can avoid having to create a framework, with much stricter API requirements, in the kernel. If you were to write kernel drivers, and got the API done, you would probably need user-space daemons/libraries to talk to the driver. Finally, user-space is interesting because it means that it works on any platform where libusb works, including Windows, MacOS X and the *BSDs. _______________________________________________ fprint mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fprint
