Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 19:03:00 +0200 From: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> To: Hallam Oaks P/L list account <mlnn4@oaks.com.au> Cc: FreeBSD Chat Mailing List <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Win95/NT drivers on FreeBSD? Message-ID: <36126444.ED83D6BE@pipeline.ch> References: <199809301547.BAA25615@mail.aussie.org>
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Hallam Oaks P/L list account wrote:
>
> >supported WinNT (and some Win98) device drivers, as shipped by the OEM.
> >Why WinNT and not Win95? Because WinNT drivers are more like Unix device
> >drivers. They have well defined interfaces to the O/S, and are _not_
>
> Having written NT device drivers myself I can totally agree with this. The NT
> kernel-level interface is very nice and quite clean. (i.e. they actually
> designed more or less all of it before they started coding, which is almost
> certainly not the case with Windows. [At least, if it is the case with
> Windows, then I'd suspect they were smoking something other than tobacco at
> the time]).
Yea, something like NDIS is not bad. But you know the current
architectual
problems of *BSD. Severeal subsystems need an general overhaul
(filesystem-
stacking (hi Terry!), device handling (hi Julian), network (pointer to
ALTQ))
and decent documentation.
The problem is to find someone who actually does it...
Beside I'd like to throw another (IMO) important point in the
discussion:
Documentation is the key to success. Students, Researchers and
Developers
look for something that they can fast and easiely understand. The choice
is based on the documentation of the paticular system. Noone has the
time
or energy to read and understand the source completely befor beginning
with programming.
This is one of the biggest problems of the free OS community (*BSD and
Linux). There is no or old documentation available. I'd like to mention
some of the recent questions that came up:
- how to write an LKM (no real docs avail, some input from Terry)
- how to write an Network driver ("copy an existing one and modify it")
- how to make an sysctl (outdated documentation)
- how to write an SCSI driver (docs not yet avail.)
- how to integrate a new FS (no docs avail.)
... and so on ...
These points make the decision easy for contributors to NOT choose
FreeBSD. Specially in the academic world is documetation important.
If they want to write something to do research on it they don't want
to read the whole OS just to get the API's... and this takes us away
a huge portion of great projects that could be done on FreeBSD but
isn't just because they don't know how it would interface.
PS: Don't flame me like Amancio! This should only lead to an discussion
of how things *should* be done and not *who* will do it.
-snip-
--
Andre
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