Newbie Questions about Device Drivers

["Miles Cederman-Haysom" <miles at cederman dot com>]

Okay, I'm a 4th year Electrical Engineering student, and I'm currently doing
a project using Cygwin - and I've got a bunch of questions about it.

I apologise if any questions here have been answered elsewhere, seem daft,
or whatever.  I have read the Cygwin FAQ, and numerous amounts of
documentation - the only problem is a lot of it doesn't make sense to me :)

Okay, first off - the project is basically to modify GDB under Cygwin so
that it can remotely debug a target (an 8260 PowerPC) through a proprietry
interface.  The interface already has a Win9x driver AFAIK, but we will
probably have to write a 2000 driver for it.

I've never done any programming before that involved accessing hardware.
I've only done Unix programming, and it was basically assignments
manipulating numbers, providing simulations, etc, never actually accessing
anything external.

My question is - how does one access the hardware through Cygwin?  As I
understand it there are a bunch of standard Win32 calls Cygwin can make - do
I access it through that?  Is this even possible?  How would you write to
the driver through C?

If I had a driver that was called the same way for 9x and 2000, would Cygwin
be able to run my GDB regardless of OS?

That's enough to get me started I think - any help would be greatly
appreciated.  Thanks in advance,

Miles



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