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Windows Drivers Under Linux?

Posted by michael on from the last-resort dept.

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?"

4 of 474 comments (clear)

  1. Instability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Instability by mausmalone · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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"

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      I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
  2. Cross Platform Driver Standards by hillct · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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    --Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
  3. Re:Bad idea by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.