In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Sergey Babkin writes:
>Jeremiah Gowdy wrote:
>> pull off. Not that I don't appreciate the work of the people who write BSD
>> drivers, the people who put time and effort into BSD drivers are some of my
>> favorite people in the world, but it's terribly obvious that if a card or
>> device is not documented, that the company is going to provide a better
>> binary driver than what a BSD programmer could put together (okay, broad
>> generalization, but I'll stand by it in most cases). The closed source
>A gross misconcept. If someone has full set of docs that does not mean
>that he actually does read and understand them completely. Worse
>yet, the authors of commercial drivers often have a very vague
>idea of how their drivers should interact with the OS.
I would just like to tell you all how lucky you are that you *can't* see
the code for the "binary-only" drivers used in BSD/OS. It's not that
they're necessarily horribly buggy, but these are people to whom "KNF" is
probably just the name of some German company.
I would rather have a driver written by a competent kernel hacker who is
familiar with the system, and has limited information about the hardware, in
most cases. Even *very* limited experience may do it; I'm not exactly a
kernel guy, and the NetBSD-on-VirtualPC patches were a lot easier for me
than they would have been for the Connectix people. (On the other hand,
the fixes to VPC were probably easier for them.)
-s
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