Testing the waters.

Peter.VanEynde s950045@uia.ua.ac.be
Fri, 9 May 1997 14:29:18 +0200 (MET DST)


On 7 May 1997, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

...
> 'Ya know, half the battle with device drivers is getting accurate
> documentation about the devices.  The rest is the design,
> implementation and testing of the driver.  We've got good quality
> information with BSD and Linux, so really what we are talking about is
> a fairly mechanical process of rewriting the C driver in Lisp.  Heck,

Just a word of warning: the kernel internals aren't _that_ easy, and I've
seen many bug reports of obscure interactions between drivers. I don't
mean C coding bugs, but real, head-breaking, nasty bugs. Two examples:
we have 2 ncr8xx drivers: a linux-original and a  FreeBSD-ported one. The
reason that there are still 2 drivers is that for some people only one
driver works. Also a while ago they found a bug in the networking code.
Not a Linux bug mind you, some other player was sending bad data and
responding badly to legal replies. This takes a lot of afford to find and
to correct. I'm not talking about the timing problems you will see. The
LispM were designed to run Lisp, a PC isn't. Are you prepared to fill up
the slack?

Groetjes, Peter

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