[illumos-Developer] Solaris Future?

[Haudy Kazemi]

On 7/26/2011 1:31 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-07-26 at 11:21 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> On 07/26/11 04:17, "C. Bergström" wrote:
>>> Intel used to provide really good support on Solaris, but I'm not sure if that's
>>> still the case?
>> Intel provides that video card support via integrations of the i915 driver into
>> the Solaris ON gate, so while they still provide really good support for Intel
>> graphics on Solaris, illumos support is currently stagnating.
> I'm working with intel, but to be honest, their agreements with Oracle
> make this difficult.  Apparently their agreements may limit how they are
> able to release code to other parties.  I blame Oracle.
>
> 	- Garrett

Perhaps further consideration could be given to making another 
compatibility or translation layer allowing the use of more FreeBSD or 
Linux or even Windows (graphics, other) drivers. It has been done for 
other OSes that suffered a lack of drivers. Linux, FreeBSD, and 
OpenSolaris have NDISwrapper or Project Evil for network cards; Windows 
used to support old DOS and Windows drivers.

Solve the problem once (build a robust compatibility layer), and you 
open up access to a whole collection of drivers without needing further 
work on each individual driver.

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+laptop/ndis
ReactOS, a GPL project, has also done work on Windows driver compatibility.

-hk