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Re: FW drivers..

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Marcel Weiher wrote:

> > From: Sean <email@hidden>
>
> > Specifically I want to have FW scanner support under OS X PB
> and/or Darwin
> > I would like to use SANE which supports network scanning as well
> as a few
> > other tweaks.
>
> [lots of questions about kernel hacking]
>
> Just a small note: you probably don't need to write a kernel driver
> to drive scanners, a user-space 'driver' accessing the appropriate
> low-level ports should do fine. I used to do a lot of scanner as
> well as printer driver development on NeXTStep/OPENSTEP, and the only
> time I went for the kernel was in order to interface to an EISA
> board with direct digital/video interface to Canon CLCs. Even then,
> only the smallest possible piece of code lived in the kernel.
>
What low level ports are used for FW?

I was thinking I needed something to load into kernel space at least as a
plug-in to the FW driver. The system has to know _kind_ of device what to
do with the device ie vender/device id crap and assign it to a pseudo
device like /dev/scanner or is it handled in a different fashion? Like
access /dev/firewire when my userspace driver searches the available
devices list or one that matches my vender and product number ID, and
possibly MAC addy serialization id FW supposedly has.

This could get mapped to a name like scanner1 and scanner2 where scanner1
isnt plugged in all the time thus a mapping on a typical unix first come
first served basis could really get screwy in cases of multiples of the
same device not permanently connected.

I suppose you could than send direct commands to the scanner and have
plug-ins for the user level program which actually seems like a better
solution than having all low-level drivers in case you want to switch
programs and they didnt use the same libs.

References: 
 >Re: FW drivers.. (From: Marcel Weiher <email@hidden>)



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