[TriLUG] Windows drivers in linux (or HURD)

[Tanner Lovelace]

James Manning wrote:
> As an aside, I'd love to see a fork of the Hurd kernel for the sole
> purpose of accepting Windows 2000 drivers.  That's one nice thing - MS
> can change all the API's they want, but they're still somewhat
> beholden to hardware manuf. and they have to keep driver DDK's and
> their API's pretty stable.  Much like, really, the CUPS solution at
> the printer-driver level, just more ambitious.  After all, if WINE can
> do the user-land API coverage (*much* more massive than the kernel
> API), a kernel should be able to handle the driver API.
> 
> How cool would that be?  A Linux-like system where you just use the
> win2k drivers off the various manuf sites.
> 
> Yeah, it won't happen, for lots of ideological reasons (and various
> technical ones), but I can dream.

Actually, this week's edition of Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net/)
had an article about two projects that allow you to load windows
NDIS network drivers in linux.  One of them is commercial and one of them
is GPL (http://ndiswrapper.sf.net/) but they both allow you to load
windows network drivers in linux.  This seems like a good start to
what you want.

(Note, btw, that the LWN article is only available to subscribers
until next Thursday at which point it will be available to everyone.)

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace(at)wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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