[movitz-devel] Drivers, standards and design

[M Bealby]

Hey all,

Between attempting to code device drivers for movitz I have been thinking about
how the drivers currently work.  Currently, the drivers are completely separate
from one another.  However, I was wondering if anyone had thought about
providing some higher level hardware information to any running applications.

By this I mean that during startup, movitz would probe for any hardware it
understands and create information lists for each device.  I envision a list to
be constructed of an identifier to explain what the device type is, followed by
the parameters of that device.  One example (for a serial port) would be:

([serial-port-key] [uart-address] [baud-rate])

Then, following this probe procedure, creating a list called something like
hardware-info, which contains all of the lists for discovered hardware.

The advantage of this approach is for hot-swappable hardware, such as usb
devices, device-lists can be simply removed or appended to the hardware-info
list.

I feel that this would be useful as any movitz applications can then access
this hardware-info list to find options available to users on there hardware.

This would only require minor modifications to the current drivers (the add and
remove hardware functions) while providing a framework to which new drivers
could be built upon.

Any thoughts?

Martin