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Windows Drivers Under Linux?
sniggly writes "The Inquirer has an article about how Montreal, CA based Linuxant
has created a 'compatibility wrapper' allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers to work on linux. After pointing to another project allowing windows printer drivers to work on OS/2 the author asks 'Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?"
This is an even worse idea than WINE. The only thing we'll gain from this is even fewer native Linux drivers. Im sure that if this works, many hardware companies won't even consider making native Linux drivers, because users can just use DriverLoader.
Things like DriverLoader and WINE are and will be misused by companies to claim Linux compatability or make quick and low quality Linux solutions. It would be great if it where to be used only as a last resort, not as a permanent solution.
We should kill of Linuxant before they hurt anyone.
In general it is not possible to use drivers under any other OS than the one it was developed for. And any kernel developer will tell you it is not a good idea. A driver needs to interface not only with the device, but also the OS. No matter how well it works with the device, it doesn't help making it work with another OS. Expecting a Windows driver to work with Linux is like expecting an SCSI driver to work with an IDE harddisk (maybe not the best anology, but it was the best I could come up with, and they have certainly been seen worse). In some cases you might be able to provide a wrapper, that makes it work, but it requires good knowledge about the interface in both directions, and the end result certainly isn't going to be as good as a native driver. If hardware vendors want a wide range of compatibility, they can easilly achieve it, it just takes a few steps.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?