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.
Not necessarily. In fact, only the part that
directly touches the hardware
really belongs there. There's nothing wrong with
doing rest of the processing
(i.e. the non time-critical parts) in the userspace.
In fact, that likely
makes the kernel a safer place.
If there's no Linux driver for a device,
then Wine cannot support it.
That would be stupid.
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.
Huh? What about sane? It can e.g. use libusb quite
nicely and *portably* to
say access usb scanners. I.e. it flies on both
windows *and* linux.
You can't load a Windows driver that accesses
hardware in Wine, as Wine
is a user-space application with no I/O
privileges.
You could, with help of a special kernel driver to
forward the requests
between hardware and userspace. libusb and usbfs do
that already for usb,
i.e. at the current point in time wine can be able
to natively support any
usb device minidriver that doesn't use a class
driver. Class drivers can be
easily developed by snatching code from linux
kernel, as long as licenses are
fine of course. All that without touching the kernel
in any way. And I mean
here full support for *any* usb device, rain or
shine. Network adapters
(visible in wine only, but so what?), scanners,
cheap webcams whose
manufacturers don't care enough to release the
specs, and the list goes on.
Cheers, Kuba
I agree, Kuba.
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Damjan Jovanovic