I recently came across an article claiming that virtualization "liberates" the OS from the hardware, basically implying that the hypervisor can now contain all of the drivers and that the OS just needs to have a standard abstraction layer for accessing the true driver involved.
Funny, I thought the OS's job was to manage the hardware so that the applications wouldn't have to. It's almost like outsourcing: in DOS, applications had to know what graphics card, printer, mouse, etc. you were using. Linux and Windows standardized this by making device management part of its job. (and yes, UNIX already did this) now hardware management is going down another level of the stack. Of course, this shift in thinking hits at about the same time that drivers have become a hot topic for Linux. Hardware vendors don't want to have to provide support to OEMs for several versions of the driver (Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, etc.), some hardware vendors are reluctant to reveal their code (for a range of reasons), and Linux kernel developers are reluctant to standardize the API. If driver management becomes the role of the hypervisor or even of the firmware and there is no "host" operating system to speak of, will Linux drivers still matter? Marc J. Miller Open Source Relations Manager, AMD Developer Outreach team Board Member, Linux Foundation Linux Foundation Desktop/Client Linux Technical Co-Chairman W: +1 (800) 538-8450 x43325 M: +1 (408) 425-4017
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
