Fwd: Linux guru needed to write device driver. Burlington, Massachusetts.

[redswami at ssl-mail.com (Chris Meyer)]

Wizard wrote:
> I'm not so sure it's that easy. I haven't written any true OS device
> drivers, but I have written hardware-level code, 8051 embedded code, and
> 80x86 assembly language stuff, and for that I really had to understand some
> things about how the hardware itself worked .... 

That's something along the lines of what I was thinking, too. I've done 
some assembly programming as well, and I have to say that if I hadn't 
had the books and the coursework surrounding that--if I'd just looked at 
the assembly code itself--I would have been all but lost ("what the hell 
is a 'shamt'?" I would be saying to myself). Higher-level languages are 
easier because (I imagine) they're designed to be closer to human 
languages and in the cases of some, like Perl, let you use almost any 
syntax you want (call a function without parentheses? Use double quotes 
instead of single? No problem!).

On the other hand, a book called "Linux Device Drivers, Second Edition" 
really does sound promising. :)

-Chris