[illumos-Developer] Solaris Future?

[Garrett D'Amore]

This is actually much harder to do well than it sounds, owing mostly to the fact that other OS' don't always have a narrow or even stable driver ABI.  Windows does a better job here than any of the free OS', but it is so unlike the others that its the hardest to adapt to.

Add to that the extra support headaches of dealing with "foreign" code, and I really think its best to have decent native open source drivers where possible.

Mostly our problem now is resourcing... we need more volunteers!

Haudy Kazemi <kaze0010 at umn.edu> wrote:

>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
>
>
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