A Sun engineer on Linux [LWN.net]

A Sun engineer on Linux

Posted Sep 26, 2004 0:57 UTC (Sun) by mmarq (guest, #2332)
In reply to: A Sun engineer on Linux by vonbrand
Parent article: A Sun engineer on Linux

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.

"IMHO the key and missing part of the 'dream' would be to some how to create a 'Split' Driver Model of some kind, and in that direction, i belive, an 'unintrusive' message passing IPC mechanism for inter-module communication is a good bet."

That is, all kernels "will" implement a form of :
kobjects[reference(not specific implementation) documented as a standard]
sysfs---------------------------------------- "--------------------------
udev------------------------------------------"--------------------------
D-BUS based kernel module IPC(the real UPnP)--"--------------------------

Those referenced documented as standards structures, dont require none or minimal changes to CPU support, memory allocation, VM, schedulers, network stacks, IO elevadors, locks, interrupt handling,..., others than the ones necessary to implement those referenced structures. How ever some deep changes (not dramatic in nature i belive) could be necessary into the subsystems that are to speak that form of IPC necessary to the model...

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...

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