[alliance-iosk] Driver programming and GPL

[vhandel@chem.vu.nl (Ramon van Handel)]

Alliance is a GPL project.  One of the benefits that gives us is that we
can use code from other GPL projects.  For the CK and EK's cores this is
probably not of much use, but other GPL OSes have a very good set of
hardware drivers:  I doesn't makes sense to duplicate their efforts.

I think the biggest collection of hardware drivers is for Linux.  These are
usually very good and stable, but they assume they're running in kernel
mode and have access to everything in the machine.  This is not the case in
Alliance.  I have found that the VSTa drivers, though, also run in a
priviledged user mode.  Moreover, unlike linux the VSTa drivers are very
clean and readable and the code isn't a mess.  I think we should take the
VSTa drivers to start with and modify them to run on top of our
IOSK/NetSK/SndSK, and then we can augment our driver set using linux
drivers and drivers from other sources.  I suggest the IOSK coders at least
get ahold of the VSTa sources and have a look at them.

Ramon


---
Ramon van Handel   <vhandel@chem.vu.nl>
Chemistry Student, OS Programmer and all-round Weirdo
The ant has made himself illustrious / Through constant industry industrious.
So what? Would you be calm and placid / If you were full of formic acid?
(Ogden Nash)


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