Re: Device drivers implemented as translators?

[David Welch <david.welch@st-edmund-hall.oxford.ac.uk>]

On 30 Oct 2000, Moritz Schulte wrote:

> Hello,
> 
>   is it possible/practical to implement device drivers under Hurd as
> translators in user space? I think of removing all the device drivers
> from GNUmach (or whatever micro kernel we use then ;), which already
> make this micro kernel quite big. Then, you could for example settrans
> /hurd/devices/floppy to /dev/fd0 and had your floppy drive available
> as /dev/fd0. What do you think about it? Is it practical?
> This would also make the Hurd more independent from the underlying
> micro kernel, because it comes with its own device drivers.
> 
It should be possible. Drivers might still require kernel mode privileges
because of broken PC hardware, for example the Linux ide driver turns off
interrupts during accesses to the controller because doing otherwise
causes data corruption in some cases.