Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 16:49:18 -0800 From: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: Bill Maniatty <maniattb@cs.rpi.edu> Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.ORG, maniatty@cs.albany.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Subject: Re: Learning the FreeBSD Kernel Message-ID: <200001240049.QAA09005@mass.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 23 Jan 2000 11:48:39 EST." <200001231648.LAA53658@cs.rpi.edu>
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> > Actually the lack a reference or tutorial document is kind of damning > in a way, since it gives hardware vendors a powerful excuse not to > support FreeBSD in the way that say Lin*x is supported. We have a better solution; they just give us the documentation and we write the drivers for them. The end result is a better driver, produced in less time, and with a motivated maintainer. I've also written skeleton drivers for hardware vendors; typically they just have to fill in the very lowest level of the driver for their device, the rest can be generated in a couple of hours based on only the very simplest description. Writing documentation is a resource-sucking nuisance; supporting outdated documentation even more so. The BSD driver model is sufficiently simple that it's fair to say that if you can't work it out from the code, you probably shouldn't be writing a driver in the first place. That's not to say that a document describing the process wouldn't be good, merely that such a document isn't actually going to help _us_ very much at all. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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