Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 11, 2004 06:03 AM
One way to get Linux better support for devices would be to have a user mode device driver model that could load Java or Mono files and run them as device drivers.
Why?
Because you could do this same thing on Windows with a similar driver. If you could give vendors a single user-space driver model and have common libraries (like SharpUSB) to talk to the hardware itself, then these common drivers would work on all platforms.
You could do it with Forth, as IBM tried to a few years ago with PREP, but with Mono and Java being literally everywhere and with a huge mindshare for writing software on<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.NET and Java, I think that it would be much easier to get developers to accept.
At the same time, for many types of devices, the driver spends most of its time waiting for the bus to respond, anyway, and the added benefit of having only checked buffers would tend to result in more secure drivers in terms of buffer overruns, etc. than we have today.
The use of a VM means there wouldn't have to be versions of the driver for each processor architecture, etc. so people running non-Intel architectures would benefit the most from it.
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Just a thought...
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 11, 2004 06:03 AMWhy?
Because you could do this same thing on Windows with a similar driver. If you could give vendors a single user-space driver model and have common libraries (like SharpUSB) to talk to the hardware itself, then these common drivers would work on all platforms.
You could do it with Forth, as IBM tried to a few years ago with PREP, but with Mono and Java being literally everywhere and with a huge mindshare for writing software on<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.NET and Java, I think that it would be much easier to get developers to accept.
At the same time, for many types of devices, the driver spends most of its time waiting for the bus to respond, anyway, and the added benefit of having only checked buffers would tend to result in more secure drivers in terms of buffer overruns, etc. than we have today.
The use of a VM means there wouldn't have to be versions of the driver for each processor architecture, etc. so people running non-Intel architectures would benefit the most from it.
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