*BSD News Article 79252


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.solaris
Subject: Re: Benchmarking different Unix Operating Systems
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 04:17:51 -0700
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
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To: Andrew Gabriel <andrew@cucumber.demon.co.uk>
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:28049 comp.os.linux.misc:131784 comp.unix.solaris:83840

Andrew Gabriel wrote:
> Yes. I spent a number of years working with a proprietry real-time
> operating system where all device drivers ran in user space, with all
> the normal user space protection, and the ability to use debuggers,
> reload if crash, etc, without the whole OS keeling over.

You wouldn't be a QNX hacker by any chance, would you? :-)

I'm not sure I'd find much merit in putting all the drivers up into user
space, though it might be interesting to come up with some sort of
"driver test harness" which allowed you to prototype a new driver in
user mode then preserve much of the code unchanged when turning it into
a normal kernel resident driver.
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project