Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 16:59:34 +0200 From: "Joachim Isaksson" <Joachim.Isaksson@ibfs.com> To: <hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: IrDA? PnP? Message-ID: <000a01be842b$eeff6e10$f56d17c2@home.ibfs.com>
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I started, just for fun, to look at implementing some IrDA functionality under FreeBSD and ended up with a few question marks regarding implementation (they're all sort of interconnected) Some are probably answered before, but the mailing list search on FreeBSD.org doesn't seem to be working today :-( 1) Is anyone already working on IrDA support? If so, I'd be happy to assist time permitting. I have a lot of catching up to do on device driver writing under FreeBSD though, so can't guarantee any instant results. (anyone got a good book to recommend btw?) I've only written a couple of very simple device drivers for the initial VAX port of NetBSD, and that was quite a while ago. :) 2) If noone has already started it, how should IrDA be implemented? I started off thinking of IrDA as a bus, but then I saw something about Linux implementing it as a network protocol(?) Still it would to me make sense to implement it as a bus (a'la USB?) with PnP devices, but I'd rather have input on this before doing something terribly silly :) 3) I've been trying to understand the PnP functionality of FreeBSD, but so far I've failed miserably. Is there any good documentation on the subject besides the source code? 4) As I (so far) understand it, the PnP functionality is a special "hack" for the ISA bus right now and could not easily be extended to integrate PnP devices on the IrDA bus? Is this assumption correct? If so, is anyone working on extending PnP device management so that, for example, the kernel (or more likely a process communicating with the kernel) could dynamically load driver kernel objects if the device was plugged in? I can see that this would be very useful for PCMCIA use too, as well as USB, IrDA and ISA/PCI hotplug solutions. 5) Is there any reason (besides the probably rather major work it would mean) not to move most if not all FreeBSD drivers to dynamically loadable modules? It would sure be easier for the "common man" to add device drivers, and it would make things like PnP much easier to implement in a dynamic way. Well, that sort of sums up my questions for now, hope you're all having a good weekend! /Joachim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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