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Re: Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) for Hurd


From: B. Douglas Hilton
Subject: Re: Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) for Hurd
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 18:58:44 -0400

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




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