On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 09:14:59PM -0800, Scott Feldman wrote:
>
> On Mar 14, 2005, at 12:22 PM, Alex Aizman wrote:
>
> >HAL-based
> >=========
> >Most Neterion drivers are HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) based. This
> >is
> >always a curse and blessing; in our experience this was the latter by
> >a big
> >margin. While the current "s2io" driver in the kernel doesn't share
> >HAL code
> >with other driver, the "xge" driver is HAL-based.
>
> e1000 and ixgb are HAL-based, which is why there is always push back
> when someone in the community modifies *_hw.[ch]. I'd hate to see more
> of this in the kernel, but I can definitely relate to the "testing
> across multiple OSes" gain.
>
> Here's an (old?) idea: remember the NDIS-wrapper project? I think the
> reverse is much more interesting. A linux-wrapper takes a plain old
> Linux driver and wraps it with what ever is needed to make it an NDIS
> driver. Or FreeBSD, or whatever. Let's pretend this is trivial for a
> second. What do we gain? 1) one clean Linux driver to maintain, 2)
> testability on other OSes, and 3) access to other OSes' certification
> kits. Licensing is clean: the Linux driver is GPL and the
> linux-wrapper code is GPL. Can't the world revolve around Linux and
> let everyone else be burdened with the abstraction layer overhead?
Depends. Vendors of non-GPL OSes can't ship such drivers for risk of
their product becoming a derived work to the extent they're relying on
such drivers to make their system useful.
You can't get around the GPL by putting a GPL wrapper with an
exception around something.
--
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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