Hi Freeman, I have seen blogs talking about the opposite direction (I recall having read some blog entry about moving X drivers into the kernel). However, with every new build of Solaris Express, I get some good or bad surprise. The bad ones usually have to do with new kernel modules that don't like my hardware and make my machine hang on boot or thereafter. So to me it looks just great if the kernel becomes really compact and changes seldom or never and new drivers are added as SMF services running in userland. I don't know much about the feasibility of this, but I have heard about others that tried. If you are really going to carry out this project, I recommend you take a look at this thesis: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jnherder/masters-thesis.php It talks about some primitives that could be provided by the kernel so that it handles high-level interrupts on behalf of user mode drivers. Direct hardware access is, I think, the greatest difficulty of moving a driver out of kernel space. Maybe you can have some inspiration on Minix's approach. Good luck.
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