Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:14:39 +0000 | From | Alan <> | Subject | Re: GPL only modules [was Re: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches for 2.6.19] |
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On Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:01:15 -0800 "Hua Zhong" <hzhong@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think allowing binary hardware drivers in userspace hurts > > our ability to leverage companies to release hardware specs. > > If filesystems can be in user space, why can't drivers be in user space? On what *technical* ground?
The FUSE file system interface provides a clean disciplined interface which allows an fs to live in user space. The uio layer (if its ever fixed and cleaned up) provides some basic hooks that allow a user space program to arbitarily control hardware and make a nasty undebuggable mess.
uio also doesn't handle hotplug, pci and other "small" matters.
Now if you wanted to make uio useful at minimum you would need
- PCI support - The ability to mark sets of I/O addresses for the card as "unmappable", "read only", "read-write", "any read/root write", "root read/write" - A proper IRQ handler - A DMA interface - The ability to describe sharing rules
Which actually is a description of the core of the DRM layer. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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