Re: binary drivers and development

Eric W. Biederman
2005-03-19T11:33:32Z

Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sf.net> writes:

> Lennart Sorensen writes:
>
> > You forgot the very important:
> > - Only works on architecture it was compiled for. So anyone not
> > using i386 (and maybe later x86-64) is simply out of luck. What do
> > nvidia users that want accelerated nvidia drivers for X DRI do
> > right now if they have a powerpc or a sparc or an alpha? How about
> > porting Linux to a new architecture. With binary drivers you now
> > start out with no drivers on the new architecture except for the
> > ones you have source for. Not very productive.
>
> Rik van Riel writes:
>
> > No, it wouldn't. I can use a source code driver on x86,
> > x86-64 and PPC64 systems, but a binary driver is only
> > usable on the architecture it was compiled for.
> >
> > Source code is way more portable than binary anything.
>
> The kernel already has an AML interpreter for ACPI. **duck**
>
> As for portability, AML would do the job. It beats typical
> vendor source code IMHO, because endianness and integer size
> are well-defined. (like the Java VM and .net)

Last I looked the kernel implemented opcodes that were not
in the ACPI spec. So I would go with defined, but not
well defined.

Eric