--- Mike McCormack mike@codeweavers.com wrote:
Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
I've been trying to add STI (still image) support
to
Wine, and I've made some progress. However, I see
a
deep and unsurmountable need to add (at least user-space) device drivers to Wine, and I would
like
some feedback on these ideas.
Drivers belong in the kernel. If there's no Linux driver for a device, then Wine cannot support it. In that case, the first step is to write a Linux device driver for it, which has the added advantage that other native linux applications can use the hardware.
The interface from user space to kernel space should be done via standard Linux mechanisms, such as ioctl. The Video4Linux API already offers such an interface.
You can't load a Windows driver that accesses hardware in Wine, as Wine is a user-space application with no I/O privileges.
I am not trying to _load_ a Windows driver (that either requires kernel support for the Windows DDK, like ndiswrapper has, or emulation of an entire x86, like bochs does).
What I am trying to do is _replace_ a Windows driver with equivalent libusb functionality, getting, in effect, something like this:
Application (eg. the Gimp) | v special SANE backend | v SANE to TWAIN converter | v Windows user-space TWAIN driver (by manufacturer) | v STI | v Wine (with "drivers") | v Wine (user-space) driver | v libusb | v kernel
Mike
Damjan
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