GPL-only symbols and ndiswrapper

GPL-only symbols and ndiswrapper

Posted Oct 31, 2006 13:38 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386)
In reply to: GPL-only symbols and ndiswrapper by proski
Parent article: GPL-only symbols and ndiswrapper

The few extra milliseconds latency is well worth it, if it's even that high.

> how are you going to emulate Linux API expected by those modules (provided you are talking about Linux modules)?
> Are you going to reimplement it in userspace?

Well, you'd hope they don't expect Linux specific API functions, or keeping them closed source makes it even more questionable than it already is. So I assume they only need general hardware interaction functions, like setting up interrupt handlers and things like that. In the case of graphic cards they have a way to send data and commands to the card, they might need a bit help with DMA and stuff from the kernel, but other than that not much more needs to be done by the kernel and the rest can be done by the userspace driver.

The userspace driver will not be easy to make and most likely be slightly slower, but even if that's 10% it's worth it to get the 4MB big unknown blob out of kernel space.

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