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Re: xwindow in oskit
At 10:01 8/16/99, Kevin Van Maren wrote:
>You are right, in that it is believed that the vast majority of
>device drivers will come from other operating systems, rather
>than being written `from scratch' for the OSKit.
>
>Could you be more specific about the reasons you dislike the
>driver model?
Well, as I said, I've just has a brief impression, I still have to
dig into it to pinpoint the exact reasons (and to write the
floppy driver :)). My first impression was that it looks overly
complicated, certainly all that horrible COM stuff.
>The OSKit driver model has two basic parts:
>1) the osenv code that is used by the device driver to obtain access
>to resources it needs (ie, memory, interrupts, etc), which has a
>default implementation (for running on the `bare HW') in the dev
>directory; and
Could you point me to this ? Manuals are nice, but what I really
need is some good example code of how to use osenv and COM ---
hopefully as simple as possible.
Can't somebody in your group spend an afternoon writing a few
"skeleton" osenv/COM drivers ? For somebody who knows the OSKit
well this is probably no problem, and it makes it so much simpler
for somebody like me to dig into the code and start implementing
the hardware without first having to figure out how all the weird
interfaces work.
>2) the exported interfaces that are used by other parts of the OS/
>application to access the device driver (this is a COM interface).
>
>Yes, there is a bit of work involved to provide the top-half COM
>interface wrappers for a device driver. However, it isn't *that much*
>work to implement the blkio interface, for a block device, or a
>netio object for a network device.
It isn't *that much* work if you're familiar with the OSKit internals.
However, I'm not, and the whole system is overly overwhelming.
Also, I personally do not intend using the OSKit as a whole, certainly
not its drivers. I use small pieces of code from the OSKit in my own
code, just like I take pieces of code from other open-source sources
(for instance, I've recently started using your GDB remote debugging
stub (in heavily modified form) in stead of the one that comes with
GDB, because it's horribly buggy.) Writing a floppy driver for the
OSKit would just be for fun, but if I have to dig through big stacks
of manuals just to write a simple drivers then I'm going to have to
give it up real soon :)
Ramon
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