xserver on OpenGL

[Kendall Bennett]

Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@yahoo.com> wrote:

> A while ago (last Feb) I built a special version of UML (user mode
> linux) that would run any Linux 2.6 device driver unchanged. It
> works because you install the hardware in the host system and then
> don't load any host device drivers for it. Instead you load a
> special one that turns interrupts into signals. Inside of UML I
> repimplemented all of the needed system calls such as ioremap().
> This really works, you can take an unchanged 2.6 device driver and
> run it in user mode. 

Wow, that sounds pretty cool! I imagine that it would be good for 
debugging, but the usability of the drivers would suffer due to the 
latencies of the interrupt->signal transitions, right?

Systems like QNX have all drivers in user land, which allows them to 
achieve the hard real time features they have. So if done right it can be 
fast too I suppose.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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