Re: A Question to throw at you guys

[Christian Helmuth]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 10:36:34AM +0100, Tom Bachmann wrote:
> > [...]
> > What if a DDL (Driver Description Language) framework could be devised
> > that was easy to learn and write for? Included modern mechanisms to
> > capture programming errors. Was only allowed to be linked to the device
> > that it was to be operating.
> 
> How would you expect that to work? The problem, as you stated above, is
> _not_ that we cannot limit what the driver is allowed to do, but that we
> have to believe it that it really needs the capabilities it asked for.

IMO the required capabalities for a driver to work can be derived from the
I/O resource and device structure. So devices attached to buses are
dominated by the bus drivers (which may be dominated by host drivers or
bus drivers again, e.g. PCI - USB - USB device). This requires more trust
into bus drivers than into drivers for the attached devices, but could
help to design a trusted driver tree. Opinions?

Ciao
-- 
Christian Helmuth

TU Dresden, Dept. of CS
Operating Systems Group
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~ch12