On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 18:47 +0100, Hans-Jürgen Koch wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 14. Dezember 2006 18:34 schrieb Bernd Petrovitsch:
> > On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 10:56 +0100, Hans-Jürgen Koch wrote:
> > [....]
> > > A small German manufacturer produces high-end AD converter cards. He sells
> > > 100 pieces per year, only in Germany and only with Windows drivers. He
> > > would
> > > now like to make his cards work with Linux. He has two driver programmers
> > > with little experience in writing Linux kernel drivers. What do you tell
> > > him?
> > > Write a large kernel module from scratch? Completely rewrite his code
> > > because it uses floating point arithmetics?
> >
> > Find a Linux kernel guru/company and pay him/them for
> > -) an evaluation if it is "better" (for whatever better means) to port
> > the driver
> > or write it from scratch and
> > -) do the better thing.
>
> Good idea - whatever "porting" means. There are lots of Windows drivers out
> there
Yes, I didn't want to open that can of worms.
> that are also partly user space using that Kithara stuff. They have most of
> their
> driver in a dll. So that is similar to what we want with UIO - except that we
> handle interrupts in a clean way, they don't.
> If you need to port such a driver, simply writing a kernel module and a user
> space
> library would change so much of the concept that you can start rewriting it
> from
Of course, if "better" means "as cheap as possible no matter what", this
is probably the way to go.
Tough luck if you get into technical problems .....
> scratch. And you'll have a large kernel module to maintain. OK, the
> guru/company
> can earn money with it, at least as long as the customer doesn't realize it is
> not the best solution for him.
Depending on the definition of "best".
Bernd
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