On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 2:05 PM, <per...@pluto.rain.com> wrote: > Gary Gatten <ggat...@waddell.com> wrote: > >> ... can a HAL be developed that runs on BSD that "emulates" >> Winblow$ such that any driver written for Winblow$ will "work" >> on *BSD? >> ... >> Something in the back of my head says there was / is something >> along this line already available or in the works, but I can't >> recall for sure. > > I _think_ we may already have something along these lines for > NDIS (network) drivers, but I don't know how well it works.
Not using it today, but it helped me in the past for some exotic NICs. Regarding the "Windowsulator", I'm wondering if such a compat layer would be possible. Don't Windows drivers all get created by some kind of DDK/WDK, against a stable kernel-ABI? I'm not familiar with Windows, but I don't think a typical windows driver as written by a hardware vendor would manipulate the windows kernel internals (data structures) directly, right? If that's correct, we "merely" need to catch the ABI up- and down-calls from and to the windows driver, and translate them into regular FreeBSD syscalls (maybe augmented by a compat helper library?). Since this is exactly the approach taken by the Linuxulator, I fail to see why a similar method hasn't been tried for those windows kernel driver (binary blobs). Maybe some artificial restrictions like, say, patents are standing in the way? Or a technical restriction like such binary blobs being encrypted with a public key, and only usable from Windows kernel with their own secret key? Only windows kernel hackers can tell. -cpghost. -- Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/ _______________________________________________ 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"
