Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: ANN: Linux Kernel Arch Repository

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "John" == John Goerzen <address@hidden> writes:

    John> Well, it's true that, for instance, certain Linux and
    John> FreeBSD drivers have a common ancestor.  However, I suspect
    John> that the different OSs are different enough that once they
    John> get ported to another OS, they tend to be rather different.

It's not just a common ancestor.  They're often maintained by the same
person, with help from a couple of others who maintain the OS-specific
parts of the interface.  Remember, when you're talking driver, you're
talking a morph from an OS's device-independent driver interface
(ioctls and so on) to the hardware's interface.  The stuff near the
hardware is going to be basically the same.

If they end up being very different, that means driver development
forked.  If the driver consists of more than a bunch of io calls to
the hardware ports with members of kernel structures as parameters,
that has to be considered a damn shame, no?

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