Wine device drivers proposal

[Marcus Meissner]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 07:52:48PM +0900, Mike McCormack 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.

Actually for still imaging devices the Linux side uses
libgphoto2, which is in userspace and uses libusb to access the kernel.

I would really suggest to implement STI on top of libgphoto2 and try
loading kernel drivers later.

Ciao, Marcus
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