> Hi, everyone, > > I would like to start a project to enable running a > driver in usr mode > as an application.
Are you sure? What about performance, i.e. user-level vs. kernel-level? > By this way we can leverage source code from other > OSes by converting them > into Solaris user application. I hope that by "other OSes" you don't mean Linux! Because it seems to be illegal to do so because of the GPL. I am not a lawyer though, but this happened before, and the Linux camp raised hell over using GPL Linux drivers in Solaris. > Also running in user mode make it easier to develop > and debug. Maybe > more robust. > > I would like to hear your opinions. I believe that if you want a better driver support, anyone who wants to do this kind of work has to "get jiggy" and "down" with DDI/DDK interfaces in Solaris. Masayuki Murayama went to do this some years ago and found out that in the end, it was just simpler to reverse-engineer the Linux source code and write a Solaris kernel-level driver from scratch. And so far, it has worked wonderfully. We have support for many different mainstream NIC cards thanks to him. So my suggestion is this: instead of investing *considerable* effort in converting drivers, just go for DDI/DDK interfaces directly and crank out kernel drivers. Sooner or later, *anyone* messing with drivers in Solaris will have to deal with DDI/DDK. And that's not a bad thing, by any means. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
