Jason R Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com> writes:

> On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 11:08:41PM -0700, Greywolf wrote:
> 
>> Begging pardon, but doesn't every layer you shove in there as an
>> abstraction cost performance?  We already endure that price for our
>> cross-platform portability.
> 
> There's nothing wrong with having an (optional) UDI shim layer, in
> case there are binary drivers that you just HAVE to have... but yes,
> native drivers are always better.

Would it be possible to build such a shim layer that provides the API
expected by windoze drivers? I.e. so that it would be possible to use
the (today useless) stuff on the CD/floppy/vendor website/whatever
that accompanies the device while waiting for native support?

I realize that the windoze API is probably neither small, elegant or
easy to provide from Unix, but is it *possible*?

If it was I think that would be really useful, since it would provide
access to drivers for mostly everything that are already written, some
of which cannot easily be natively implemented due to lack of
documentation.

Johan Ihren