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How About Drivers In Devices?

Posted by Cliff on from the the-next-step dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I was setting up a new system the other day and after trying to find 30,000 different device drivers, it hit me: What's wrong with the idea of having basic drivers for common OSes in a flash ROM embedded within devices, so that when we plug the device in, the driver is then downloaded to the machine in question? You could always update it or override the process, but it would sure save us a lot of scrambling around for disks. Am I the only one who has thought of this?"

2 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Only Person? Not likely! by nathanh · · Score: 5, Informative
    Am I the only one who has thought of this?

    You're only like the hojillionth person who has thought of this. It even got implemented on a fairly large scale by Sun. The SBUS cards from Sun used a general purpose driver written in "FCode" until the OS booted and the real driver could be loaded. One benefit of FCode is that the card can be used before the OS boots (useful for Ethernet and SCSI cards). The other great benefit is that FCode is CPU and architecture independent: it's an interpreted language!

    http://sunsolve.sun.com/data/802/802-3239/html/sbu sandfc.html

    I'll bet money that Sun wasn't the first company to implement the idea, and almost certainly not the first people to think of this idea. You're probably 30 years too late for that.

  2. Re:hmm, let me think by dimator · · Score: 5, Informative

    This one?

    --
    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"