Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: binary drivers and development | From | (Eric W. Biederman) | Date | 19 Mar 2005 04:29:54 -0700 |
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Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sf.net> writes:
> Lennart Sorensen writes: > > > You forgot the very important: > > - Only works on architecture it was compiled for. So anyone not > > using i386 (and maybe later x86-64) is simply out of luck. What do > > nvidia users that want accelerated nvidia drivers for X DRI do > > right now if they have a powerpc or a sparc or an alpha? How about > > porting Linux to a new architecture. With binary drivers you now > > start out with no drivers on the new architecture except for the > > ones you have source for. Not very productive. > > Rik van Riel writes: > > > No, it wouldn't. I can use a source code driver on x86, > > x86-64 and PPC64 systems, but a binary driver is only > > usable on the architecture it was compiled for. > > > > Source code is way more portable than binary anything. > > The kernel already has an AML interpreter for ACPI. **duck** > > As for portability, AML would do the job. It beats typical > vendor source code IMHO, because endianness and integer size > are well-defined. (like the Java VM and .net)
Last I looked the kernel implemented opcodes that were not in the ACPI spec. So I would go with defined, but not well defined.
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