Linux Kernel To Have Stable Userspace Drive

liquidat writes "Linus Torvalds has included patches into the mainline tree which implement a stable userspace driver API into the Linux kernel. The stable driver API was already announced a year ago by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The last patch to Linus' tree included the new API elements. The idea is to make life easier for driver developers: 'This interface allows the ability to write the majority of a driver in userspace with only a very small shell of a driver in the kernel itself. It uses a char device and sysfs to interact with a userspace process to process interrupts and control memory accesses.'"

Comments

Re:Performance

[corychristison]

If you'd have read the article, you'd notice that it states firmly:

However, DMA transfer between userspace and kernelspace is not yet implemented. This means essentially that drivers which involve high traffic are not an option yet. So graphic drivers as well as file system drivers and similar cannot use this API at the moment.

Vista already has this (not trolling, read on)

[AlphaWolf_HK]

FWIW, not trying to troll, but thought I would point out that this feature is one of Vista's improvements over XP, and simultaneously the primary reason why Vista's compatibility isn't that great right now, and thus the primary reason why many people don't switch to Vista yet. Most of the hardware vendors have to make big changes to their drivers in order to accommodate this, especially nvidia who has to make about 4 different user space drivers (one for d3d, one for opengl, and an SLI version of both of those.) This is a good thing to have for both security and stability reasons, and I was waiting for when somebody would add this to the Linux kernel.

Linux has the advantage in that with Linux you can use both the old "kernel only" drivers, and the user space drivers at the same time. Vista could have done this as well, however Microsoft felt that if they allowed this to happen, then most hardware vendors would be lazy and continue to use their old kernel mode drivers, thus defeating the purpose. And to be honest, I agree with them. Linux doesn't need this on the other hand, as eventually somebody who is interested will make these kinds of changes to all of the open source drivers anyways as needed, which can't really happen because most windows drivers are binary only, so Linux can more or less take the "phased change" approach.

Disclaimer: I use both Vista and Linux (gentoo is my preferred distribution,) and am not afraid to say that I don't hate either of them, and rather like both of them.

Re:Vista already has this (not trolling, read on)

[wwahammy]

Actually it was there before Vista. Windows Media Player 11 came with the first version of the userspace driver framework. I think its used for media players that sync with WMP.

My understanding was that Microsoft recommended companies move to userspace not that it was required. To be fair though, I know very little about WDDM so they might have different requirements.

When I read the headline, the first thing I couldn't help but think was if the roles were reversed there would be hundreds of people saying "Good to hear you got something Linux had for a year already." Good ideas are good ideas. Why can't people just be happy when their ideas are recognized as good by others?

Re:Useless API, for simple drivers only

[suv4x4]

What is impossible is fast thread switching, kernel synchronization primitives, access to the network stack (wireless!), ring-0 CPU instructions, real-time timing access, and the huge reduction in context switches / cache flushes that comes from running within the kernel (moving code to user-mode increases latency by a factor of 3, roughly). Kiss the lag-free desktop goodbye as hard drive latency skyrockets, watch your 3D framerate drop by 70%, see your webcam stutter into unusability.

Nice rant there. Let me summarize it:

"What is impossible in user space driver is kernel space features".

No shit. That's the point of a user-space driver. If you give a user-space app access to ring-0, it's no longer user-space. Or did you imagine there's some sort of unwet water that the stupid developers of the kernel keep missing.

The user-space driver is not set to replace all kernel mode drivers. Just like Vista, it's set to replace *some* of them, for example USB devices with low traffic. It's not a solution from heaven, it's just a reduction of fail-prone pieces that lurk in your system.

If you RTFA you probably had to read the summary as well where it's said user-space drivers aren't suitable for high-performance gear such as graphics cards.