Re: AdaOS

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Philip Cummins <philip@no-spam.cs.uwa.edu.au> wrote:

: Essentially the USB HAL abstracts out a common front end API for the
: USB device drivers to talk to the USB hardware which frequently changes
: depending on which motherboard and chipset you're using. This removes
: the need for each individual device driver to know what hardware it is
: running off and hence redundant code.

Nick, have you really read these sentences? It says, or
I interpret it to mean, that in "old" nomenclature, the
"device driver" is not one big glob of software, but something
layered, following some engineering practice. With obvious
"software organization" advantages, even at run time. It makes
a difference if you have replaceable parts with separate access
control properties or just one big driver which does at best
have structure at the source level.

Georg
(Another very successful HAL is the JVM :-)