I thought about a number of things today, but no time for writing it up, because I had to write a long answer mail regarding my POSIX level driver proposal for Hurd on L4.
The foundation of this proposal is the fact that on a multi-server microkernel system, we have quite a lot of freedom about how to implement hardware drivers -- my take on it being to treat them just like ordinary applications, with only a minimal set of special mechanisms for driver-specific stuff, on the premise that drivers actually aren't that much special in their nature, and shouldn't be in the implementation. This offers a large number or advantages over other approaches: To users, admins, and system distributors, and even application and driver developers. (Of course, the advantages mostly relate to usability :-) )
The most important of those advantages are of a very generic nature -- stuff that I will cover in other posts sooner or later. (Though maybe in different contexts.)
The linked document is a longish, very technical description of my proposal, explaining what it is about, trying to outline some of the advantages (though probably not very well), and describing my ideas on a possible implementation on Hurd/L4 in quite a lot of detail. Especially the last section requires some knowledge of the Hurd, L4, and the Hurd port to L4.
Now probably I will be dreaming about competing driver framework proposals for Hurd/L4. Not sure yet whether this will be pleasent dreams or nightmares.
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