From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Feb 12 12:08:59 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 112F11065B5D for ; Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:08:57 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from cyrus.watson.org (cyrus.watson.org [65.122.17.42]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 449218FC26 for ; Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:08:55 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rwatson@FreeBSD.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [65.122.17.41]) by cyrus.watson.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id C5ABB46B5C; Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:08:54 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:08:54 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson X-X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Andriy Gapon In-Reply-To: <4992DD6B.3050507@icyb.net.ua> Message-ID: References: <4992DD6B.3050507@icyb.net.ua> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (BSF 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: userland driver? X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:09:04 -0000 On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Andriy Gapon wrote: > has anybody tried anything in the area of userland drivers on FreeBSD? I > mean a driver for something sufficiently simple and standalone and not > driven by interrupts. E.g. some sort of a watchdog driver that simply > reads/writes some io registers from time to time. > > Brute-force and a very bad way is to go through /dev/mem, /dev/io, /dev/pci, > but I am thinking about something that would allow to plug into newbus > framework from userland. I recently had a related question from a colleague about implementing a synthetic USB device in userspace so that software part development can occur concurrently with hardware part development. Robert N M Watson Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge