At 05:02 PM 3/29/99 -0600, David L. Nicol wrote:
[regarding my desire to sponsor some SCSI drivers]
> I would like to do it / be part of doing it
Good news.
>although my vision of driver porting is even broader -- instead of
>merely porting each interface, why not port the linux modular interface
>at a higher level so that we can pull in anything there is a linux
>module for?
Well, to be honest the reason this does not get me pumped is that I am not sure this would deliver what I am looking for. I would not want to introduce security problems through such an interface and I am not sure that this provides what I am really looking for. I would love to say that I want to make the world a better place by providing a means for incorporating any Linux device driver into EROS but I honestly only care about my narrow part of the world, where I need a driver to the NCR chip, the Adaptec 2940 and 7890 as well as the Intel EtherExpress Pro network interfaces (Intel 82558) for some boxes I want to ship off somewhere. If porting the Linux system does not introduce security problems and speeds up rather than slows down the process then it is good, otherwise it is fluff to me.
> What kind of timetable do you have in mind? On what order of magnitude
> is this sponsorship/bounty?
I would have to say that it depends on time and how much other fluff is going into this effort. I am willing to pay more for a fast and direct port of the SCSI drivers I need and the Intel NIC drivers. As far as general order of magnitude goes, I would guess between 2 and 5 K depending on time, stability, and what the drivers provide (e.g. if they cover the specific areas I need then more...etc.) [I am also flexible on the bounty. My timeline is that I ship boxes in September; the hardware is fixed, the deadline is fixed, if there are no EROS drivers then I wing it with OpenBSD which is my second choice.]
jim