Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 07:03:40 -0500 (CDT) From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@verizon.net> To: Pete <TheManifestShadow@gmail.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Driver Development Books? Message-ID: <17200319.1129118620885.JavaMail.root@vms170.mailsrvcs.net>
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>From: Pete <TheManifestShadow@gmail.com> >Date: Tue Oct 11 11:47:28 CDT 2005 >To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org >Subject: Driver Development Books? >Hello, > I have what may seem to be a silly question, but I cannot find any >other decent resources on the web. >.< The problem that I am having >right now is >that I have a fairly nice graphics card which, for the moment is only >supported on Windows Operating systems, and old 2.4 Linux kernels. So >far there has >not been much positive outlook in porting the drivers to *BSD or any of >the 2.6 kernels that I know of, let alone 64-bit drivers for non-Win OSes. The video cards usually have nothing to do with the kernel itself. Their drivers are in the X Window system. Probably the easiest fix is to just install an older version (3.x probably) of XFree86 on your machine. >So I guess that makes my question fairly simple then; I know that driver >code is written in C (which I am learning currently) but thats about all Well, you usually need a bit more expertise than "learning currently" to write drivers. >I know. I'm probably >not far off when I say that I need more to go on. Yet, from looking at >Amazon.com I have not been able to find any books on writing driver >code, which is really >frustrating. Searching for "device driver" turns up a lot of books on Amazon. For the system-specific details look in the online FreeBSD Device Driver Writer's guide (part of the Handbook if I remember correctly). Anyway, for the graphical cards it's not what you need. The graphical drivers are running in user space as a part of X server. Writing them is a completely different story and I don't think there are any manuals. Just look at the code of the other drivers and do the same. -SB
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