On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 07:53:18PM +0100, Frank Barknecht wrote: > So basically they want to protect their investment in getting > knowledge of how to implement a powerful firewire interface from the > eyes of other hardware manufacturers. It's a pity, of course, but also > somehow understandable. Actually I find their reasoning rather weak. Since this is based on firewire, the driver would not actually be talking directly to the hardware. It is not as e.g. with PCI where a set of FPGA registers would be directly mapped and visible to the driver. With a layer like firewire in between, it should not be too difficult to actually hide all real hardware details - just use a high level of abstraction. Of course this requires more intelligence in the hardware, which is now probably at least in part in the driver. -- FA
