Talk:Forth Lesson 10

Device Driver Usage

Is there any way for the operating system to use a device driver in OFW? ... Peasthope 16:36, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but you would need to code the operating system to do so, and we have not done that. The operating system drivers outperform the Open Firmware drivers, because they are designed for different purposes and execution environments. That said, the software development kit (sdkit) is an Open Firmware instance that runs in the context of an operating system process, and the device drivers can be loaded and used there if the kernel device driver is disabled. Also for XO-1.75 and XO-4 the Open Firmware boot process constructs a device tree describing how to access the system devices, and passes an address of the device tree to the kernel. The kernel then interprets this tree to figure out what device drivers to activate. --Quozl 07:43, 19 November 2012 (UTC)