On Mar 7, 2011, at 9:28 PM, Svein Skogen (Listmail account) wrote: > But he does raise a valid problem (if more than zero users, etc). "We" > (I include fellow FreeBSD users, but also OSX and Linux users) do lack a > decent cross-platform device manager stack, with uniform device name > enumeration. DevFS (and its peers in Linux) does give us a start, but > not enough to build a system on. However, I suspect that getting this to > be truly cross-platform would take "a known name" in BSD-land, > OpenIndiana/Illumos and Cupertino agreeing with RMS that "making this > worth would be a nice summer-of-code project".
Oddly enough, Sun, IBM, and Apple agreed on something known as OpenFirmware, and expansion cards were expected to provide basic OS-independant drivers written in Forth on a ROM (PROM/EPROM/EEPROM). It worked pretty well, but consumers complained loudly about spending an extra $20 on a ~$200 AHA-1540 card to get the OF version.... Much of that is still available under a BSD license (something called OpenBoot, IIRC), but most of the industry is staggering towards EFI instead. Regards, -- -Chuck _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
