Am Donnerstag, 14. Dezember 2006 18:34 schrieb Bernd Petrovitsch: > On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 10:56 +0100, Hans-Jürgen Koch wrote: > [....] > > A small German manufacturer produces high-end AD converter cards. He sells > > 100 pieces per year, only in Germany and only with Windows drivers. He would > > now like to make his cards work with Linux. He has two driver programmers > > with little experience in writing Linux kernel drivers. What do you tell > > him? > > Write a large kernel module from scratch? Completely rewrite his code > > because it uses floating point arithmetics? > > Find a Linux kernel guru/company and pay him/them for > -) an evaluation if it is "better" (for whatever better means) to port > the driver > or write it from scratch and > -) do the better thing.
Good idea - whatever "porting" means. There are lots of Windows drivers out there that are also partly user space using that Kithara stuff. They have most of their driver in a dll. So that is similar to what we want with UIO - except that we handle interrupts in a clean way, they don't. If you need to port such a driver, simply writing a kernel module and a user space library would change so much of the concept that you can start rewriting it from scratch. And you'll have a large kernel module to maintain. OK, the guru/company can earn money with it, at least as long as the customer doesn't realize it is not the best solution for him. Hans - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
