25 Nov
2004
25 Nov
'04
5:17 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 07:53:18PM +0100, Frank Barknecht wrote:
So basically they want to protect their investment in
getting
knowledge of how to implement a powerful firewire interface from the
eyes of other hardware manufacturers. It's a pity, of course, but also
somehow understandable.
Actually I find their reasoning rather weak. Since this is based on
firewire, the driver would not actually be talking directly to the
hardware. It is not as e.g. with PCI where a set of FPGA registers
would be directly mapped and visible to the driver. With a layer like
firewire in between, it should not be too difficult to actually hide
all real hardware details - just use a high level of abstraction.
Of course this requires more intelligence in the hardware, which
is now probably at least in part in the driver.
--
FA