Re: Questions

[Sam Mason]

Martin Schaffner wrote:
>Similar concepts could be used as are used for user-space USB-"drivers" 
>in existing OSes, where not all USB devices have kernel-level drivers: 
>some are driven by an application.

That's what I was expecting the answer from Marcus to be.  The only
real driver would be for the USB interface chipset, it would export an
API that could be used by something like "libusb".  This would allow
the user's programs to talk to the devices actually connected to the
USB bus.

In other words, users wouldn't need the ability to install drivers as
it's VERY difficult to do that in a safe way - they would just run
appropriate programs that would talk with the real USB driver that the
system admin got working.

An advantage of doing it like this, is that there aren't any silly
discussions about which MPEG decompressers are suitable to put run in
kernel space - like we occasionally see in the Linux world.

An interesting discussion then becomes how do we determine the
permissions of everything?  We probably don't want remote users to be
able to talk to whatever device was just plugged in.  But I guess this
isn't anything of great immediate interest as it should be easy to
leave this sort of policy till much later.

Cheers,
  Sam