Re: Window Systems

On Thu, May 13, 1999 at 02:37:47PM -0400, Eric Jacobs wrote:

> 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

  [ ... ]

> 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

  Check out OSkit (http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/). It has a
portable device driver framework that uses Linux of FreeBSD drivers in
source form, and has all the "fake" kernel support you'd need. I'm currently
using it for my Nilo project (www.nilo.org) so I can use any ethernet card
support by Linux. Way easier than writting a packet driver... What's also
really cool is the latest OSKit snapshot (after the 0.97 release) which has
support for running OSKit hosted applications as a user task on Linux, which
is great for debugging.

  Unfortunately, they haven't yet created wrappers for the graphics cards,
although they also have an MGR and X11 port. It might be possible to use
their kernel routines to speed up supporting svgalib. btw - OSKit is also
GPL'd.

        - rob -
Received on Thu May 13 19:10:20 1999