Wine device drivers proposal

[Mike McCormack]

Damjan Jovanovic wrote:

> I've been trying to add STI (still image) support to
> Wine, and I've made some progress. However, I see a
> deep and unsurmountable need to add (at least
> user-space) device drivers to Wine, and I would like
> some feedback on these ideas.

Drivers belong in the kernel.  If there's no Linux driver for a device, 
then Wine cannot support it.  In that case, the first step is to write a 
  Linux device driver for it, which has the added advantage that other 
native linux applications can use the hardware.

The interface from user space to kernel space should be done via 
standard Linux mechanisms, such as ioctl.  The Video4Linux API already 
offers such an interface.

You can't load a Windows driver that accesses hardware in Wine, as Wine 
is a user-space application with no I/O privileges.

Mike