Module/Driver layers (Was: sound volume and kerneld)

Christian Holtje (docwhat@uiuc.edu)
Thu, 11 Apr 1996 01:27:31 -0500 (CDT)


Why don't we break the modules/driver things into two layers?
For things like sound drivers and lp drivers (which is my pet peeve with
the module systems....I hate my printer re-initializing everytime I print
a page), they can be broken into two parts (same for SCSI, serial ports,
ethernet cards, etc).

The first paart would be a hardware layer. It would do nothing but
sit on a device (say a parallel port) and remember things, like the
status bits for the various lines or the sound levels on a sound card or
the IRQ/IO address and packet counts for ethernet cards. This would
remain in the kernel.

Then you could have the specific drivers/modules load and unload as
needed? All of these devices have identical/nearly identical sets of
resources, right? Or is that something that just doesn't happen on intel
platforms?

Christian G. Holtje (aka Doctor What)

---
    ---     ---     ---   -      -  -  -   ---  -----  docwhat@itek.net
   +   -  +    -  +      +      +  -  +  -   +   -    CS major at Illinois
  *   +  *    +  *      *  +   *  +*+*  +*+*+   *    ---- finger me at ----
 ****     ***     ***   **  **   *  *  *   *   *       docwhat@itek.net
also:  http://www.itke.net/~docwhat

Q: Why would the government want to get rid of PBS? A: Fifteen more minutes of Pentagon running time.