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?

Funny windows drivers

[bobthemuse]

What about all the windows drivers which have a 'light' NDIS layer solely to establish a communications channel with the hardware and assignment of resources. They then rely on more complex programs to do what should happen in the driver.

I'm thinking of several printers, including the new MFDs, not to mention the separate mess called 'WinModems'.

Native Drivers, Please

[nurb432]

No thanks, id rather have native drivers for my hardware. Not some sort of kludgy hack to make windows drivers work..

Even if it worked well, there is no guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't make it impossible to keep doing this, leaving us out in the cold.

+ you cant honestly think performance and stability would be the same as a true, well written, native driver for your chosen OS ( regardless of what that OS is )

Ultimate Lock In

[Crashmarik]

Not a good thing. If Drivers are written for windows and then emulated to other OS's it will give Windows a permanent performance advantage.

Re:Ultimate Lock In

[Hard_Code]

"If Drivers are written for windows and then emulated to other OS's it will give Windows a permanent performance advantage."

If drivers are written for windows and then "emulated" (not really emulated, just run through an abstraction API), it will render windows IRRELEVANT. Slow drivers run infinitely faster than NO DRIVERS. Once the drivers become commoditized a HUGE reason is eliminated for keeping Windows around (the current main reasons being ubiquity of 1) applications 2) drivers; we have already achieved #1).

Drivers are only really a performance concern (as far as an abstraction layer is concerned) for things like graphics card drivers, which are already woefully absent in Linux (and of course they change frequently as the technology is updated). I'd wager most "desktop" users of Linux don't even have kernels recompiled for their specific CPU, so I think an abstraction layer isn't going to make much of a difference.

Bad idea

[Simon Lyngshede]

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.

Re:wow

[kasperd]

I've actually wondered about this before and if it was possible

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.

• Use open standards whenever possible
• Provide sufficient documentation
• Provide an open source driver

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