Re: Replacing devices

[itschere@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de]

Thierry Bousch wrote:

> So, the big question is: should BIOS calls still do something sensible
> when a custom driver is installed? Personally, I couldn't care less
> about this, and it's not a trivial problem anyway...

 In general, I would say: No.

 To be more detailed I think it shouldn't be a very big problem for MiNT to
catch BIOS calls and redirect them to device driver calls. The calls are in
fact already catched, but for now only old BIOS routines are called. One must
only think of a way to uniquely identify a driver from its old BIOS device
number, and that's probably difficult if you don't replace the old one but
install two new ones.

 Another thing: I don't know if modm0dev doesn't implement ioctl for various
terminal settings, but I've had other problems using SLIP: I wasn't able to
set terminal disciplines before calling slattach due to some mysterious bug,
and after it the device was reported to be already in use, so I wasn't able
to set them at all.

 I clearly see the idea of moving lock-jobs for dial-in or dial-out devices
from the user to the kernel, but mightn't this can-only-open-device-once be
an argument against it?

ciao,
TeSche
--
Torsten Scherer (Schiller, TeSche...), itschere@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, Germany, Europe, Earth...
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