Re: [avrdude-dev] How to add I2C device disable preamble?

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Eric Weddington wrote:

> > Any idea if AVRDUDE would work with VISTA?  ...

> The issues with vista that I am aware of have to do with
> spawning/execing a new process.

That probably means avarice is at risk.  But then, it depends on
Cygwin on this, so as soon as Cygwin could emulate it, it might
work.

> However I don't know how it would work with any of the hardware
> issues like parallel port or serial port. Hopefully that hasn't
> changed much, but y'never know.

For the parallel port access, it basically depends on whether the
"giveio" hack would still work on it: it elevates the privileges of
any task opening that driver so they are eligible to perform direct
port IO (IN/OUT).  For sure, you wouldn't be able to watch one of
those very valuable Holywood Schinkens while giveio.sys is active...

Of course, if Windows Vista finally saw the light, and provided a
driver to access the parallel port concurrently with the print spooler
for non-printing jobs, *that* would be great: avrdude could then be
made work without that giveio hack, by scheduling all handling of the
parallel port to where it belongs to: into the operating system.  That
takes a microsecond longer to accomplish, but avoids all the potential
security holes of a process performing random port IO by itself.

Basically, that's the way avrdude works on all Unices where parallel
port IO is supported (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD).  Each of them ships
with a native OS driver supporting bit-banging the parallel port.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)