Re: Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) for Hurd

[Ildar Mulyukov]

                Hello, Doug!
Does it mean that in future Hurd will use drivers of OSKit?
        Ildar

----- Original Message -----
From: "B. Douglas Hilton" <doug.hilton@engineer.com>
To: <ildar@3ka.mipt.ru>
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 3:11 AM
Subject: Re: Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) for Hurd


> Actually, Roland McGrath of the Debian GNU/Hurd project has
> done some substantial work with OSKit/Mach, and it is ever possible
> to run the Hurd on this microkernel as opposed to GNU Mach.
>
> OSKit/Mach uses the University of Utah's excellent OSKit package
> to provide basic hardware functionality, and its drivers are largely
> unmodified BSD and Linux 2.2 style drivers.
>
> Roland basically hacked all the driver code from GNU Mach and hooked
> it into OSKit. This setup provides a very good base for adding drivers in
> a well understood way.
>
> OSKit/Mach is still very experimental and lacking in some features. I have
> yet to successfully get it to work with my Hurd installation, but I still
> occasionally put on my kernel hacker hat and go a couple rounds with it
:-)
>
> For me, when I boot it I get a kernel panic pretty quickly, but I have a
> SMP system so that might have something to do with it.
>
> It is anticipated that OSKit/Mach will likely supercede GNU Mach in
> the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution at some point in the distant future.
>
> In any case it is good because then however OSKit implements their
> drivers is irrelevent to Hurd. They will be free to experiment with
> newer driver systems and as long as the external API remains reasonably
> consistent the microkernel will not be affected.
>
> Cheers!
> - Doug
>
> Ildar Mulyukov wrote:
>
> >     Hello!
> > I wonder do you plan to do device drivers via UDI
> > (http://projectudi.sourceforge.net/) or some other (better) Hardware
> > abstraction level? Or how?
> >         Ildar