> > Having used NetBSD for many years now, the biggest problem I see
> > with NetBSD is device drivers.
> 
> I don't perceive it, being quite satisfied with NetBSD hardware support,
> but of course others may have different experiences.

Depends on what hardware devices you need to talk to.  If I only needed
SCSI disk and SCSI tape I would be perfectly happy with the driver support.

But in these days of "convergence" I need to talk to things like

	USB scanner (doesn't talk at the 480 Mbps speed for some reason)
	IEEE 1394 (firewire) camera (no driver at all as far as I can tell)
	HD-3000 tuner (no driver at all as far as I can tell)

SCSI disks haven't been keeping up (small capacity and expensive) so I added
a 250 GB ATA disk.  I/O to the ATA disk causes problems with rs-232 and ethernet.

	com1: 5 silo overflows, 0 ibuf floods
	de1: abnormal interrupt: transmit underflow

I'm guessing a latency problem servicing interrupts, but that's just a guess.

> > What would it take to create an interface that allowed linking
> > in drivers from FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Linux/... ?
> 
> The Xen 2 work:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2004-oasis-ngio.pdf could be what you
> are searching for. I don't think that linking of Linux drivers directly to
> NetBSD will be ever possible...

Thanks for the URL.  Sounds like this Xen thing is some sort of Uber-OS
that could be very useful for various things.  Although if I'm right about
the latency problem, I'm thinking that Xen would just make it worse.  I
need to read the Xen paper a couple more times and try to get my head
around it.

If things like Xen are possible, it seems like it should be possible
to create some sort of alternate driver interface or a wrapper for
drivers from sibling Unix-ish OSes.