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A Sun engineer on LinuxA Sun engineer on LinuxPosted Sep 25, 2004 18:39 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: A Sun engineer on Linux by mmarq Parent article: A Sun engineer on Linux
IMO what Open Source needs in that department, is again standards, not Linux standards but a Open Source Driver Model from OpenDarwin to BSDs to Linux and possibily OpenSolaris,... let the *better* kernel win !... Nice sentiment, but that won't fly. Just look at the massive changes in the driver model in Linux from 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, to 2.6. They weren't gratuitous, there are sound reasons behind the changes. And surely while there is a healthy dose of "Oops, screwed that one up; let's try and make it right this time around" (BTW, the people designing this changing interface did look at the "unchanging interfaces" used elsewhere), at least some of it has been predicated by external changes (hotplugging all over the place just wasn't even a pipe dream when Solaris started some 10 years back, much faster CPUs, hyperthreading, large memories, NUMA, you name it, have changed the demands on the driver model dramatically). In the end, it is the driver model that makes up a large part of the OS. By mandating an unchanging driver interface, Sun is painting themselves into a corner, IMHO. Sure, they can continue dressing up their particular corner with their own high-end iron, but even with very large margins there the PC price/performance will eat them alive over short or long. It killed off DEC and a lot of other midi-frame vendors, and even mainframe vendors like IBM are looking elsewhere.
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A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 26, 2004 0:57 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] Yes, you might be right in the sense that the horizont of that sentiment may lay far away in a distance galaxy...
Perhaps a better aproach, could be, i belive:- Gentleman, if your BSDs, OpenDarwin, OpenSolaris(??) want to profit from the far superior hardware support that Linux has(A FEW YEARS FROM NOW), you could work to help OSDL to create separated trees of your kernels that implement for your kernels the technical superior features relative to device driver support( open to discussion), and that way create an Open Source Device Driver Model, that all kernel and Unix flavours could profit in the sense that a "low level" kernel module could be used *UNCHANGED* across kernels.
That is, all kernels "will" implement a form of :
The latency of such a 'Declaration' could be enourmous, yes,... worst it could inflate the personality not of some kernels, but of some kernel developers beyond the explosion point,... but persistence would win,... there were already mingling code between Linux and BSDs far before,.. better 'they' are using ALSA(FreBSD i belive), as well as KDE and GNOME.
All of a sudden, we are actualy talking of code and documented mechanisms that exist already in large proportion...
The pipe dream then dosent seem of a far galaxy anymore...
A Sun engineer on Linux Posted Sep 26, 2004 1:33 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] hmmm... may be i'm wrong,... but an IPC mechanism for drivers (D-BUS based or some other form talked above) could be the help to implement proper HOT-Pluggin across the board,... as well as suspend to disk,... as well as proper power saving modes to all categorys of hardware that compose a computer...
Although i not the right person to discuss such details, and i'm not trying to sell nothing to nobody.
By the way,... IMO was closed platforms not exactly hardware/software, but *MOSTLY HARWARE* for in house comsuption only, that not only killed DELL, but almost killed Apple, until they changed to PCI and ATA/SATA, and also kicked the well of P4 sells when Intel insisted on RAMBUS,... and is definitely pushing SUN into the edge... So having *no form at all what so ever or not* of a standard for hardware device drivers had nothing to do with those mysfortunes... Just look at Microsoft with their WinHEC specifications,... hein!??
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