On Thu, 11 May 2000, Ed Carp wrote:
> Steve Hill (sjhill@cotw.com) writes:
>
> > True on the first sentence. Ted Ts'o has done a tremendous job of mainting
> > the serial stuff among others and the base 'serial.c' driver probably does
> > not need much tampering with. I do disagree with your second sentence. The
> > point is kernel hacking/development is not meant to be easy. If you're not
> > willing to spend a few days or a week (maybe longer) learning how it works,
> > then maybe you should find someone to write the driver for you if you're
> > not willing to put in the effort of learning. Sorry I cannot be nicer
> > about that.
>
> What??? You're kidding, right? Do you realize how many lines of code there
> are in the kernel and all the drivers? If I spent a week on each driver,
> I'd never get through. "If it was hard to write it should be hard to
> understand", huh?
>
> This sort of elitist attitude really irritates me. "I am the God of Whatever
> Driver, and Ye Shalt Come And Worship At My Feet". If kernel development isn't
> supposed to be easy, then I guess from that perspective Linus is a complete
> fraud and a wimp because he didn't write the base kernel in machine language.
> Kernel development is by no means a piece of cake, but it should be no harder
> than absolutely necessary.
>
> Kernel development should be supportive of new people coming in, not trying to
> shut them out.
> --
> Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com 940/367-2744 cell phone
> http://www.pobox.com/~erc
>
STOP! Everybody STOP! We've got to rewrite the whole kernel over again
in Visual BASIC so the new-comers can see how it works. Or perhaps
we declare a C++ kernel "object". With polymorpism, it writes itself.
I think this is the guy that wanted to know about writing a driver for
the 8250x, right? If so, it's the easiest chip to program that we will
ever find. However, he's got to get a data-sheet <shudder> and find
out what the registers do. Most of serial.c has to do with supporting
the Unix-specific terminal protocols and parameters (termios.h), etc.
Very little has to do with supporting physical hardware.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.3.41 on an i686 machine (800.63 BogoMips).
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