Defining a common minimal Kernel Programming Interface

Question about which tools to use, bugs, the best way to implement a function, etc should go here. Don't forget to see if your question is answered in the wiki first! When in doubt post here.
Post Reply
[email protected] (

Defining a common minimal Kernel Programming Interface

Post by [email protected] ( »

Hello, OS developers.

As there are more and more OS projects on the web and more and more hardware devices to support, i wondered wether we could cooperate and produce a sort of 'Standardized Kernel Programming Interface' (a kind of osdev api) for hardware device drivers, so that a wide range of kernels could share the same device drivers ...

the Osdev KPI could include informations such as:

- the binary format used for drivers (for instance, a ELF file having an init() and a reset() function)
- the environment that drivers will be able to use from the kernel (how to get memory, buffer-class memory, how to start a kernel thread, write to a log, etc.)
- a driver descriptor, that could be used by the kernel to access the driver (usual read/writes?)


Let me know how you feel about this ...
The Legend

RE:Defining a common minimal Kernel Programming Interface

Post by The Legend »

>On 2002-03-29 07:16:13, [email protected] (Pype of Clicker32) wrote:
>Hello, OS developers.
>
>As there are more and more OS projects on the web and more and more hardware devices to support, i wondered wether we could cooperate and produce a sort of 'Standardized Kernel Programming Interface' (a kind of osdev api) for hardware device drivers, so that a wide range of kernels could share the same device drivers ...
>
>the Osdev KPI could include informations such as:
>
>- the binary format used for drivers (for instance, a ELF file having an init() and a reset() function)
>- the environment that drivers will be able to use from the kernel (how to get memory, buffer-class memory, how to start a kernel thread, write to a log, etc.)
>- a driver descriptor, that could be used by the kernel to access the driver (usual read/writes?)
>
>
>Let me know how you feel about this ...
What if someone wants to implement unix-style device files with ioctl ()?
This won't fit into my kernel, as I won't some sort of COM/Corba-style driver model.

The Legend
Post Reply