Re: Sparc port?

[OKUJI Yoshinori <okuji@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp>]

From: Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Sparc port?
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:17:34 +0000

> But, am I right in thinking that in both cases the device drivers are
> part of the kernel, so a buggy device driver can crash the kernel?

  Of course, it's possible that a buggy device driver crashs the
kernel, because it can write anything to IO ports. However, user space
drivers don't crash the kernel as often as kernel space drivers. In
kernel space drivers, invalid memory access will cause a fatal error
unless the kernel can recover such situations, while it will just kill
the process in user space drivers.

> By the way, isn't Linus's employer Transmeta, according to some
> rumours, working on the sort of multimedia stuff that is likely to
> require a real-time operating system, which usually means a microkernel
> ...?

  RT-Linux is not a microkernel.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
OKUJI Yoshinori  <okuji@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp>           ^o-o^
http://duff.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~okuji (in English)     m /