On Tue, 2006-01-24 at 04:49 +0200, Sergei Steshenko wrote: > Regarding > > " > firmwares are not drivers. Firmwares are an entity of their own. Please > inform > yourself about firmwares and what they do and where they live and compare > them to drivers. And there are many firmware hacks or open firmwares if you > use a search engine of your choice. > ". > > Specifically, regarding "Please inform yourself about firmwares ..." I hope > I am well informed - I used to write both firmware and drivers, in pre-Linux > (and pre-Windows for that matter) era. > > You probably are missing my (implied) point, which is: > > 1) we have an IDE drive separated from the CPU by IDE bus. The IDE drive > runs closed-source firmware, which is in terms of the controller inside the > drive still software. There is no fuss about it; > > 2) we have a WiFi card or an audio card - both sitting on PCI bus, i.e. they > are separated from the CPU by PCI bus. If the cards are running closed source > software (their respective drivers) there is a fuss about it. > > Comparing the above two I'd say that the difference is IDE bus vs. PCI bus. > > So, why do we have such a discrimination here. Aren't buses and drivers > created > equal ?
Because of things like DMA, and interrupts, where a misbehaved driver can hang the machine, or write any data anywhere in the kernel's address space, and driver code runs on the same CPU, in kernel context. Misbehaving firmware can disable the device, but it does not have full access to the kernel's internal data structures the way drivers do. Lee ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
