The difficulty at the moment is that there is some change in the device interface underway at the moment. We are trying to shift towards a more dynamic model, (to allow more loadability) but that means that drivers for 5.x and later are not exactly the same as for 4.x and earlier. Also, as we go forward, the device model may change a bit more..
Usually proprietary drivers can be divided into a numbert of parts.. 1/ A proprietary part that knows how to talk to the hardware, but doesn't know anything about the rest of the system. 2/ The interface routines that the kernel calls to make requests. 3/ The utility routines that the proprietary parts call to make requests of the system. (e.g. write a sequence of bytes to the control ports, or print erro messages) Parts 2 and 3 can be released as source allowing the burdon of keeping them 'in sync' with the rest of the kernel to be assumed by the kernel maintainers, while part 1 can be released as a binary object. Loadable kernel modules do work but htey are only valid for a particular 'line' of kernels. For example modules written for 4.1 can usually be loaded into 4.5. (there are some limitations) Thety would however need to be recompiled for 5.x or 3.x. Dividing the driver as I suggest would allow that burdon to be assumed by the FreeBSD project. > > ----- Forwarded message from "Herman, Thomas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- > > > > To whom it may concern, > > > > I'm inquiring about how to go about installing a driver from a floppy > > disk. We're developing a driver for the IDE controllers and we do not > > wish to submit the source code to the public domain. Does FreeBSD > > support 3rd party driver disks? We don't have a standard way to load them but we do allow loadable drivers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
