From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jan 25 8:14:50 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from moffetimages.com (alar.scruz.predictive.com [207.251.1.130]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C3ED150A4 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:14:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brianm@moffetimages.com) Received: (from brianm@localhost) by moffetimages.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id IAA41422 for freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG; Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:16:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brianm) Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:16:48 -0800 (PST) From: "Brian D. Moffet" Message-Id: <200001251616.IAA41422@moffetimages.com> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Learning the FreeBSD Kernel In-Reply-To: <20000124123920.F2643@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have to agree here, one of the major issues in writing device drivers, which I used to do for a living, is getting proper documentation for the devices themselves. For something like video cards, it's even worse because the cards change so rapidly. I can imagine that there will be some issues with hardware vendors (especially large ones) not wanting to give out their doc to someone who is claiming to write a driver for FreeBSD. It's probably almost as bad for Linux. I know it was pretty difficult at times for a company like SCO (where I wrote drivers for a living, in case anyone couldn't figure that out :-) As I get into writing drivers and other bits of code for FreeBSD, my past will keep me from releasing the code undocumented in some same fashion, and hopefully some reasonable user documentation, and yes that takes time. Thankfully for me, I have seen both the SvR? driver model as well as the BSD model, so I think I'll be able to pull it off... Lord knows it took me long enough to figure out what the kernel.conf parsing was like :-) Maybe I'll take it on myself to look into documenting various stuff, who knows.. Yeah, when I no longer work for a living... Brian Moffet > There are two almost completely separate issues in writing drivers: > > 1. Writing the code to deal with the device. Having good vendor > documentation helps here. > > 2. Fitting this code into the BSD framework. Having good OS > documentation helps here. > > I can't agree with Mike Smith that reading the code is adequate. It > certainly doesn't apply to newcomers, but it doesn't even apply to > seasoned hackers like Mike.... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message