Fw: Device drivers

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "CH" == Chris Hanson <chanson@mcs.com> writes:

CH> What I think Emergent's saying you need to do is make LispOS look
CH> as much like the Win95/NT4[1] graphic driver architecture to the
CH> video card as possible.  That way, the card thinks it's runnig on
CH> Win95 or NT4 and all our OS needs is the proper code in its
CH> Intel-side[2] driver architecture to make us look like Win95.

It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical to talk about the merits of
`Lisp all the way down' and yet embrace the premise of proprietary drivers
in LispOS.  At least with the free C sources you can look at what the
driver is doing and re-implement it in Lisp without too much pain.

Even if Unix parts are impossible to use or adapt, there's Flux, which
will do the driver repackaging for us.  Between Linux, BSD, and
XFree86 there is no scarcity of drivers.  Sure, maybe there is some
system call emulation or source modifications that need to be added
for the sake of XFree; the emulation for Windoze drivers would surely
equally braindead.