Re: What do you think about UDI?

Erik Andersen (andersen@inconnect.com)
Tue, 31 Mar 1998 15:30:22 -0700 (MST)


On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, David Woodhouse wrote:

>
> pkoning@xedia.com said:
> > Most drivers are largely OS specific code (the actual hardware
> > fondling is in the minority). Abstracting that in a meaningful way to
> > a meaningful range of operating systems is unlikely to succeed,
> > unless you don't mind having no performance at all.
>
> However, the other targets OSes listed are at least Unices. It's not like
> trying to support WinNT device drivers.
>
> And we're trying to avoid having "no performance at all". Bad performance is
> better than no performance, so until a native Linux driver for the hardware can
> be written, an abstracted driver provided by the manufacturer is surely a
> viable alternative?
>
> ---- ---- ----
> David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355

I fully agree. In fact, for a lot of devices, I would be willing to
live with slightly lower performance. How many people care how many
Mb/sec they get out of their floppy drive or parallel port?
For some things, it really doesn't matter. In fact, I would gladly
quit messing with all the kernel cdrom drivers if there were UDI
drivers for all the different cdrom types. Who would _really_ care that
the sbpcd cdrom drive only put through 174kB/sec instead of 177?
It would sure be one heck of a lot easier then trying to find docs
for the stupid things! As a kernel device driver maintainer, I would
absolutely LOVE to quit messing with the kernel, and spend my time
writing GNOME apps instead. We hack device drivers all the time, because
we have no choice! For the kernel to support all the cool things we want
it to support, we current _have to_ write device drivers. At least with
UDI we will have a choice. Sure for _some_ devices it would be better to
have native drivers to squeeze the last drop of speed out of the system, but
for a lot of things, it just doesn't matter at all. Let the OEM do the work.

-Erik
Thinking that UDI will be great!

--
Erik B. Andersen   Web:    http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/ 
                   email:  andersee@debian.org
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