After hacking a driver for the Jorway 73a SCSI-CAMAC controler under
Solaris 2.4, I'd agree totally. There is a tremendous amount of
overhead in assuming that the driver need be MT safe. Solaris makes
things have to happen this way for a sound reason but it makes the
driver 10X heavier and more complex than we need it for an SS10 (that
they won't let me run Linux on 8-(). I can see benefits as well for
enforcing such a scheme even in monoprocessor situations, but one can
code to those benefits without having that much complexity.
On the other hand, if a company wants to support Linux, then who am I to
complain. They should keep in mind what hardware base their code will
run on. Maby push an MT safe (heavy but works everywhere) and a non MT
safe (smaller and lighter) driver.
Rob