RE: kbuild & C++

From: Lee Revell
Date: Wed Sep 07 2005 - 13:52:45 EST


On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 12:17 +0200, Budde, Marco wrote:
> Well, it is not the first driver I am writing for Linux.
> So yes, I do know, what is part of a Linux driver and
> what is not.

It should be fairly obvious. Windows drivers do all kinds of crap that
just obviously doesn't belong in the kernel, often to implement features
that Windows doesn't have. For example half the Windows sound drivers
do AC3 decoding inside the driver (and half of those lie and say it's a
hardware AC3 decoder).

On Linux we use a simple userspace program called ac3dec for that.

Anything that can reasonably be done in userspace belongs in userspace.
We DON'T do things in the kernel just because it would be slightly
faster or it has an RT constraint or the kernel lacks some feature that
your driver wants or whatever.

Lee

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/