Loadable device drivers...in V.4?

[Erik Sean Nolte]

In article <35110 at cup.portal.com> ts at cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes:
[ loadable device drivers: ]
>I wish vendors would do this.  It's not even hard.
Fortunately, Unisys already does this with their 6000/10/3x/5x/WS
Unix boxes & Converent's S series machines.  The command to load the
driver is lddrv and it operates roughly as you've described.

>I wish they had pursued it.  I've developed a couple of drivers since
>then, and would have really appreciated being able to test minor changes
>without having to rebuild the kernel.  In my experience, there is a long
>period at the end of a driver project where the thing works well enough
>that it is not crashing the kernel, but it needs various tweeks.  This
>stage would go much faster with a way to load drivers without rebooting
>the system.

I don't write many actual device drivers, but I find the loading feature
especially useful for STREAMS module debugging.