Re: Window Systems

john@synergy.caltech.edu writes:
>the GGI library needs some sort of device to talk to. currently it uses
>dynamic
>loading of modules to support different devices at runtime... libGGI
>itself
>doesnt talk to any hardware directly... the KGI portion however does
>talk to the
>hardware and goes into the linux kernel... hmmm perhaps it is time
>somebody
>write a 'linux kernel device driver' server which would emulate enough
>of the
>linux kernel to allow their device drivers to be used without change...
>it
>actually probaby wouldnt be as difficult as one might think, as there
>is a
>pretty strict interface which they must follow and most of them are a
>thin layer
>that just bangs the hardware... hmmm..
> John

That sounds like a good idea. I've looked at the source of a couple of
linux
drivers and it seems possible to make a linkable library that would
work with
existing code. There would be some overhead as the driver in Linux is
expected to do kernel stuff like verifying the user's addresses, etc.
And, the
interrupt handlers wouldn't actually be executing in an interrupt, but
as a
normal process responding to an interrupt message. But, for the
majority of
drivers it seems like it should work.

Speaking of OS compatibility, I found this on a Mach project page
(http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flexmach/mach4/html/projects.html):
"
VSTa integration: Introduce some level of VSTa compatibility into Mach,
so we
can take advantage of some of the cool stuff that's being done in VSTa.
I
haven't explored this much yet, so I don't know what might be feasible,
but the
possibilities should at least be checked out. For starters, it would be
great
if we just had someone permantly acting as a go-between for the two
projects: someone who can keep fairly close track of both systems, keep
recent versions of both of them installed and running on their machine,
suggest possible ways to cross-fertilize or make the projects converge,
and
so on.
"

Is anyone involved in this? I know that the Mach team is also trying to
get
more device support into their microkernel via Linux drivers. It would
be
nice not to duplicate efforts. How does the Mach architecture compare
to VSTa's?
Received on Thu May 13 10:34:30 1999