Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 23:05:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: More on the Intel-UNIX standard Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.02A.9809202258210.8094-100000@redfish> In-Reply-To: <19980921144910.T8807@freebie.lemis.com>
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On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Greg Lehey wrote: > Not so. I saw considerable merit. The Linux people seemed to take > the attitude "If we can't get source for it, we won't support it". I > tried to make it clear that if it became mainstream (as is quite > possible), we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by ignoring it. > There was also considerable confusion about the difference between UDI > and I2O. Even worse is what is going on on linux-kernel right now; people ranting about how Linux needs to implement it but have a versoning scheme to force each driver to be recompiled for each version of the kernel to force people to release source and recompile for each kernel version. That just isn't my idea of "free" software. > > The major problems seen by the group were: > > > > 1) Binary-only device drivers are a bad idea. It will reduce the chances > > of us getting access to the hardware interface specs, and therefore > > being able to build a device driver that works. > > Agreed (I hope you do too). But it looks as if we're going to have > sources. If a vendor doesn't release their specs now, this isn't likely to change that. If a vendor does release their specs now, they have a reason for doing so. What is that reason? I think you will find that a lot of the same reasoning still applies. This is especially true when you consider that if this does become reality, it won't do so instantly, so even once they do have UDI drivers released, many of the reasons why people want specs today still apply in the short term. In fact, some of the reasons why many vendors don't want to release driver source are due to their own little tricks to get more performance out of specific platforms that they don't want others to see, and the sheer hassle of releasing source for all the different platforms they make drivers for. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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