Alan Ritter, Western Washington Univ. senior and computer science major, received recognition on Oct. 16 for his successful participation in Google’s Summer of Code. He spent the summer working on a code which makes Windows network drivers adaptable to the NetBSD operating system.
One Student’s Experience with Google’s Summer of Code
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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i don’t have netbsd running in my computer but i have heard so many good things about it that i would like to give it a try. it is good to know that there are students interested on Netbsd.
hopefully, this is going to help to make all these *bsd distros more popular.
great job.
-2501
I’m very happy they’re porting FreeBSD’s NDISulator (a.k.a. “Project Evil”) to NetBSD.
Edited 2005-11-12 08:14
I’m wondering, if it was possible to implement the WDM model in a UNIX environment as to allow Windows drivers to be used on any UNIX on x86 that supports the WDM model. Anyone out there who can give me the situation; is it possible or is it so complex that it would be simpler to just work for hardware compatibility with drivers developed from scratch by hacking away at hardware?
Sure it is theoretically possible but there are problems:
1. Based on the “stability” of wine and Reactos and a similar project I rember a while ago for ntfs, I wouldn’t want to be running any sort of critical driver in it.
2. The bloat added would be significant.
3. If/as Linux gains market share companies would have no greater motivation to port their drivers which would in the long term thanks to the first two problems hurt Linux.
IMO reverse engineering + pressuring companies to support Linux is a much better long term solution.
“I’m wondering, if it was possible to implement the WDM model in a UNIX environment as to allow Windows drivers to be used on any UNIX on x86 that supports the WDM model.”
Absolutely possible. The real question is how difficult would it be to implement? I couldn’t do it, but there are a lot of skilled coders out there, and I for one, am not about to underestimate them.
Implement ntoskrnl.exe (1600+ exports), a HAL (maybe ~50 exports or so). win32k.sys (another big number of exports) – the graphics subsystem, is optional. Now you can reuse the ReactOS driver components for the rest. It’s quite complex code so it will require a few man-years to complete.