Compiling Linux Driver under FreeBSD

[Kenneth Culver]

Quoting Henrik W Lund <henrik.w.lund at broadpark.no>:

> Kenneth Culver wrote:
>
>> <snip>
>
>  >
>
>>
>> What you want to do can't be done. The best you can do really is port the
>> driver. The kernel internals/driver apis are totally different between linux
>> and FreeBSD.
>>
>> Ken
>
> Greetings!
>
> Speaking of driver APIs, do you know of any good resources on that one?
> I've tried the developer's handbook on the website, but this seems more
> of a general introduction to programming with a little twist of FreeBSD
> sprinkled lightly. Are there any secret manpages, like code(9) and
> style(9) that are any good? I'm definitely getting "The design and
> implementation of the FreeBSD operating system" when it comes out, but
> that's this fall.
>
> The reason I'm asking, is that I'm kinda toying with the idea of porting
> nvidia-driver to amd64, but I've browsed the source, and it's a tad too
> much to really get an understanding good enough to do any porting (or
> even modifying, for that sake). I realize that there's also the whole
> problem of nvidia-driver depending on Linux-compat, which isn't entirely
> completed on amd64, but that's being worked on, as far as I know.
> Besides, I won't be porting anything unless I learn the required APIs.
>
> Must....learn....APIs.... Need....APIs....   ;-)
>

For porting the nvidia driver, you most likely can't, because nVidia has a
binary-only part of that module that they would have to recompile in order for
it to work on amd64.

The driver-writing documentation is here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/arch-handbook/driverbasics.html

although I'm not sure how up-to-date this stuff is.

Ken