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

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.