RE: HAL for Drivers

Perhaps a worthwhile endeavor is to unify interfaces, advocate and
promulgate a device driver (HAL) bridge spec for portable drivers. Perhaps
the various existing OS's such as linux and *bsd would need bridge driver
entrypoints in several parts of the source tree, but the general methods of
accessing any given driver could be squashed to least-common-denominator
(fs, mentioned below).

The idea that Intel's I2O could have been such a spec was intriguing, and
unfortunately also proprietary and ultimately stillborn.

The beginnings of this would work well if such drivers interfaces were
wrapped into a unified filesystem spec, again, a portable spec designed to
be 'just one more driver' in each adopting OS (which coincidentally would
also facilitate the development of unoptimized filesystem drivers for
ra(b|p)idly portable testbed development).

Reiserfs has an interesting approach to method calls to the filesystem
driver itself, such as the proposed "<dir>.archive" method. Something like
this would exemplify a means of extensible additions to the base driver
without introducing new binary interfaces at compile time (by tarring a
directory in this case).

Looks like Bochs and Plex are the dominant momentum in virtual machine stuff
but I haven't read that either offers device solutions are actually geared
toward simplified portability.

Am I missing some ongoing effort that addresses concepts like these already?

My $.02.

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin_Doering@mn.man.de [mailto:Martin_Doering@mn.man.de]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2000 2:57 AM
To: vsta@zendo.com
Subject: HAL for Drivers

Andy wrote:
>This would be a really, really good project for anybody interested in
doing
>something Truly Useful. An example of the approach to take is the
wrappers
>which the Flux OS Kit folks put around the FreeBSD drivers.

I read, that the FreeBSD Folks have some HAL to abstract the hardware over
the platforms and to make proting of drivers a bit less complicated. Can we
use the same HAL? Or does it not fit into VSTa?

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Received on Wed Dec 20 20:36:46 2000