Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 23:50:39 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: More on the Intel-UNIX standard Message-ID: <199809210650.XAA12068@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 20 Sep 1998 23:05:22 PDT." <Pine.GSO.4.02A.9809202258210.8094-100000@redfish>
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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. No, and we can happily dismiss that sort of ranting. But we should point said ranting out to Intel and the other UDI folks as indicative of the sort of people they may be getting involved with. > > > 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. UDI is a source-level standard. If the vendor doesn't release source, that's up to them. Their source may well contain their trade secrets, which is not necessarily a bad thing. > 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. With UDI, there is only one platform - UDI. The same source (if compliant) will build and work on all compliant platforms. This lets you tell a vendor "gee, here, borrow a BSD machine and build your UDI driver, then put it up as 'unsupported'". That's better than a kick in the face. 8) -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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