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RE: Looking for basic documentation on Cygwin and Serial Ports


Gary R. Van Sickle wrote on 26 April 2008 20:26:

> There's a new federal law that makes it illegal to blame anybody other
> than Microsoft for bad drivers.  The one exception is if you've ever done
> Windows driver development yourself, 

  <puts hand up>

> in which case the law doesn't need to apply 

  Hah, they'd never take me alive anyway!

> [ ... ]  I'm not the
> "M$" hater that most everybody else in the world is, but their treatment
> (read: complete ignoring when not deliberately impeding) of driver
> developers is criminal.

  ISTM these days that there's actually plenty of info out there.  It's
actually been several years now since they /started/ taking seriously the
notion of documenting the ddk apis properly, and there's also always been a
lot of good books and folks like OSR and sysinternals.  If you understand all
the principles of device driver coding from other environments (resource
management, synchronisation and hardware programming issues, for the most
part) then I figure a copy of the Dekker/Newcomer driver book and the Nebbett
Native API book should be all you need to be capable of writing and debugging
a decent quality windows device driver.

>>   Another issue is that there are an awful lot of devices
>> such as bus analyzers and fpga programmers and so on that all
>> use FTDIchip devices internally, and all the manufacturers
>> ship their own lightly-customised variants of the FTDIchip
>> drivers, many of which are out-dated or immature versions,
>> and the different drivers all stomp on each other trying to
>> claim the same VID/PID combinations.
>> 
> 
> This is the Windows kernel version of the "don't have multiple Cygwin DLLs
> in the same room at the same time" and "installation as an afterthought"
> issues.  The key differences being:

  Hmm, I think I'd point a fair amount of the blame at FTDIchip and their
partner companies in this case, for poor co-ordination.  In fact FTDI do run a
subregistry with their PID block and offer to issue ranges to their customers,
but somehow the damn things still end up clashing. 

> - The organization responsible for this travesty is run by the richest men
> in the world.  Must be good to be king.

> [ ... ] the situation is even more pathetic, were that
> possible.  [ ... ] if Microsoft would simply [ ... ]
> instead of actively fighting its very existence.

> but I guess that's asking too much of the richest SOB in the world.

  Heh, we'll make a M$-hater of you yet.  You're half the way there already,
and for all the right reasons.

    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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