From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <1ffd3f9abf6e39e95f3bfdb7cdca0a10@quanstro.net> To: 9fans@9fans.net From: erik quanstrom Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:15:37 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20080614012433.7F7D05B46@mail.bitblocks.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] I/O load crashes Qemu Topicbox-Message-UUID: c0a340b6-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 >> i find there's a certain simplicty in dealing directly >> with hardware, provided one has documentation. > > Provided it is complete and the h/w well designed and > interface regular. Unfortunately not all that common. you continue with this claim without presenting evidence. i respond to this because i think there is a prevalent attitude, not well-informed by experience, that hardware is bad and impossible to program. my opinion, based on experience, is this is not true. and restating the untruth has the consequence of discouraging folk from working on drivers, thus reenforcing the myth. were it true, it would not be an attitude condusive to getting things done. hardware, unlike linux, is unavoidable. to your claim: in my experience, the complexity of the hardware has very little to do with the complexity of the driver. for example, the intel 82598 10gbe is a beast of a part. 341 pages of documentation. 200 registers. yet it's a simple driver because 1. of experience with other ethernet drivers; 2. everything the driver needs from the kernel already exists; 3. most complicated functionality was ignored; 4. the spec has not changed; and 5. only one part implements the register set. - erik