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?"

Comments

Instability

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the BSOD in Windows 2K/XP are caused by unstable drivers. Will using these drivers in these wrappers destabilize Linux as well?

Re:Instability

[Anonymous Coward]

Its pretty close to fact. If you look at the bsod dumps you can see its usually right in the middle of some driver. Its usually walking off into some memory it does not have rights to. Or has jumped itself to someplace odd and tries to exacute bad code. That is what MOST BSOD's are from.

Most of the 'windows' BSOD's were shaken out years ago. New hardware scares the willies out of me with new drivers. Most of the core of windows is fairly stable. I havent seen a BSOD out of the 'windows' NT stuff in years. Now the new services that MS is adding in. Thats a different story...

Re:Instability

[cymen]

Think of the opposite -- using these drivers on Linux could finally clear up which drivers are responsible for the crashing the system and absolve Microsoft from blame (in these specific cases). Free driver stability testing, apply within. Kernel compilation experience required.

Re:Instability

[mausmalone]

If there's one thing you can definitely hand to the Linux development community, its error handling. I bet if the driver dies, the wrapper will tell you something like "______________ Win32 driver has crashed. Restarting driver in 5..4..3..2..1"

Re:Instability

[Mike McTernan]

Naaa,

I wrote a Java program that would BSOD XP after about 20 minutes of running. The online crash analysis told me that Microsoft were aware of the problem and looking into it.

I tried the same program on Linux and found that I had a file descriptor leak (through Runtime.exec() calls), it would throw an exception citing "Too many open files" after around 20 minutes. The box stayed up just fine though...

Still seems like there are some bugs in XP that are not driver or HW related...

Thanks

Re:Instability

[mvdwege]

You do realise you just proved the point, don't you?

Let's see:

1. Java app running on Linux uses System resources and runs out of file handles: application gets shut down gracefully with a meaningful error message.
2. Java app running on WIndows 2000 uses System resources and runs out of file handles: Kernel panic.

Now what system handles this better? Regardless how badly the app is programmed, no way a userspace application should cause a kernel panic. The fact that it can do so on Win2k is testament to Win2k's quality.

(Note that by exhausting system resources like filehandles, a badly written app can DoS even a well written kernel, but that is still not the same as causing an outright panic).

Mart

Cool

[gilesjuk]

I mentioned ages ago that this would solve a lot of driver shortages. Now if this layer can snoop and aid the development of Linux drivers then even better. Of course laws can be broken with this approach.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

What about a compatibility layer under Windows for Linux drivers? Or simple a "portability layer" that would allow one driver model (even if new) to run under both Win32 and Linux? Then driver writers would at least have 1 api to write to for both Linux and Win32 and not 2 apis. This has been done in the gui space already, why not in the driver space?

Cross Platform Driver Standards

[hillct]

While on one level it's great to see this sort of standardization, one has to ask whether standardization on the WIndows driver architecture is the best choice. This is what standards organizations are for. While I like OSS as much as the next guy, and things like Wine, or other compatibility layers such as those mentioned in the article are certainly valuable in their own right, They shouldn't be seen as a mechanism for promoting standards. This just promotes adoption of proprietary mechanisms as de-facto standards, which is seldom a good thing.

I'm just waiting for Microsoft alter their EULA to disallow software written using their (presumably patented) driver architecture and copyrighted APIs on competing platforms, in a bid to deter hardware manufacturers from providing linux support by increasing the development costs for linux support through preventing unified cross-platform driver development.

--CTH

WinPrinters/WinModems

[rf0]

Would this driver help WinPrinters/WinModems work under linux as with there bgin so many driver types as WinModems being such a 1/2 way house.

Rus

Re:Bad idea

[IamTheRealMike]

I don't think you can draw comparisons.

Firstly, writing a new driver for Linux is several orders of magnitude easier than rewriting an entire application for portability. A program like MS Office will never, ever be a "native" app, say that uses GTK, Qt, whatever - it's far too huge to ever rewrite in that way.

A driver, on the other hand, is not so complex, and can be more easily developed independantly, especially by the community.

Really, Wine is useful primarily for apps that will never, ever be ported. I've seen little evidence that it discourages companies from doing native ports. I've seen quite a few companies do native ports even when their programs worked just fine in Wine. Only time will tell if this has bad effects or not.

Re:Native Drivers, Please

[PCM2]

The thing is, though, that Microsoft's driver APIs have to remain stable if they're going to get hardware manufacturers to write drivers for them. If they start making changes that break this driver compatibility layer, then they also break current drivers.

Well, Apple has done this regularly, so I don't see why Microsoft wouldn't. I think it was the release of Mac OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar") that broke everybody's printer drivers ... printers that used to work with the earlier versions. Apple works with the major inket manufacturers (Epson, HP) to get drivers on the OS distro discs, but vendors who were on the fence about supporting the Mac OS anyway (Brother) were left in the cold.

Re:performance and stability

[bn557]

I'm going out on a limb here, but if I were setting up another server running linux, I'd at least make sure that all the hardware I'm using is properly supported under linux. There aren't going to be many servers requiring this, I'm guessing. Sure, you can mention print servers, but most schools and companies are now willing to spring for a ps or ip available printer.

P

Informative??? It must be either troll or funny!!!

[axxackall]

I've got myself BSOD on Win2K just after installing update patches. The hardware worked fine before, and it works fine after reinstalling the system. The booting Linux for testing also did not find anything wrong with hardware.

Another several lockups with BSOD were caused by unstable NTFS. I wonder how many more decades Microsoft will deliver that must-already-be-dead filesystem?

Somebody, fix the moderation of the parent properly!

This is exactly what I was talking about

[Pan T. Hose]

very practical and a great way to pollute your system with proprietary crap. In other words it's great for open source advocates and evil for free software advocates (myself included).

If the 1% of proprietary crap on your system makes it usable, with the option being a 100% proprietary environment, I'm all for the little bit of proprietary crap. If proprietary stuff brings more users, more and better Free Software will be developed.

In other words you are in the open source camp (see OSI) -- pragmatical and practical imperatives, in the oposition to purely ideological and political ones of free software movement (see FSF). This is exactly what I was talking about.

As for making the system "usable" I have really no idea how having pure free software system (in The Church of Emacs sense) renders it somhow "unusable." I don't need Windows drivers, since I don't buy crappy hardware without support in my kernel. I don't need win32 codecs for MPlayer, since I don't pirate movies. I don't need patent-violating MP3 players since I don't pirate music, which means I can have all of my CDs ripped to superior in every way Xiph Ogg Vorbis format.

I also don't care about more users -- only about more developers and with my Debian those are completely orthogonal (I don't use commercial GNU distroes, with which I admit that the user base is indeed important).