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Driver Development Toolkit !

Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:25 pm
by forart.eu
I just discovered this interesting project, and i believe that a similar tool (or even better a Web version of it) would be great for KOS:

WarpDriver
In OS/2, like all modern operating systems, there are certain tasks that only a device driver can perform. Most of these tasks involve communicating with hardware, but there also system-level tasks, such as allocating locked and physically-contiguous memory. If a programmer wants to write an OS/2 application that needs to perform any of these tasks, he typically must write an OS/2 device driver.

For an experienced OS/2 driver programmer, writing OS/2 drivers is easy. But the learning curve is very high, and so for for everyone else, it can be too difficult. The alternative is to hire an OS/2 driver programmer, but they are usually hard to find and very expensive.

WarpDriver aims to solve this problem. WarpDriver is a "generic" driver that can perform many of these driver-specific tasks. It also "exports" the tasks to any application that needs them. For instance, WarpDriver can post a semaphore whenever a particular device generates an interrupt.

Some of the current and planned features of WarpDriver are:
  • registering resources with Resource Manager
  • device I/O
  • notification of interrupts
  • memory allocation
WarpDriver is very similar to Jungo's WinDriver product, which is also available for OS/2. However, WarpDriver is free, source code is available, and WarpDriver will eventually have more features than WinDriver. There are also plans for a WinDriver compatibility layer so that developers who use WinDriver on other platforms won't need to purchase the OS/2 version in order to support OS/2.

WarpDriver is developed under the BSD license, which is a very liberal license that allows both private and commercial use. If you need a different license, please contact the developers.
Hope that helps, or at least inspires...

Marco Ravich