Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 22nd Jul 2007 00:33 UTC, submitted by liquidat
Linus Torvalds included patches into the mainline tree which implement a stable userspace driver API into the Linux kernel. The stable driver API was already announced a year ago by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Now the last patches were uploaded and the API was included in Linus' tree. The idea of the API is to make life easier for driver developers: "This interface allows the ability to write the majority of a driver in userspace with only a very small shell of a driver in the kernel itself. It uses a char device and sysfs to interact with a userspace process to process interrupts and control memory accesses."
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Member since:
2007-06-22
It won't change anything for nvidia/ati drivers since new userspace drivers dont provide DMA transfers. One would also get much more context switches on interrupts from devices using this userspace api. So it means that userspace drivers are pretty bad for things like network card/sata controllers or graphic cards. The possibility of a closed source drivers is nearly a side effect, as one can read in the original german article. Anyway, i think the stable kernel api would be bad since we will get another monstros drivers like fglrx which can't be fixed, since noone is alowed to fix them and vendors wont't be compelled to release open-source versions( even limited ).