Re: binary drivers and development

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

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