From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Sep 30 10:03:22 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id KAA04882 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:03:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from opi.flirtbox.ch ([62.48.0.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA04873 for ; Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:03:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from oppermann@pipeline.ch) Received: (qmail 20102 invoked from network); 30 Sep 1998 17:00:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO pipeline.ch) (195.134.140.3) by opi.flirtbox.ch with SMTP; 30 Sep 1998 17:00:45 -0000 Message-ID: <36126444.ED83D6BE@pipeline.ch> Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 19:03:00 +0200 From: Andre Oppermann Organization: Internet Business Solutions Ltd. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.03 [en] (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Hallam Oaks P/L list account CC: FreeBSD Chat Mailing List Subject: Re: Win95/NT drivers on FreeBSD? References: <199809301547.BAA25615@mail.aussie.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message