generic driver source question

[kaluce]

forgive me if this is some sort of noobish question, but I was just curious why everyone uses linux drivers to port to OSX, since OSX is a port from BSD, wouldn't it make more sense to use some sort of BSD based kernel drivers? Has apple changed it so much that it's no longer compatible? I've only really made a small driver or two for linux to get an RTC running, so I don't know the ins and outs of the linux kernel too well.

 

Reason why I was asking was because even though core-audio is the de-facto standard with OSX, maybe it would be better in the short term to port over some sort of generic audio driver which acts as a compatibility layer from BSD/Linux drivers to OSX. Similar in nature to the wireless NDIS driver from linux that uses windows drivers natively, this way we get the sheer amount of audio drivers present in Linux's ALSA/OSS system in OSX.

 

Of course I know that something like that would probably be monumental in workload even to a team of people. But being able to use a codec dump from linux + the actual driver to produce even just 2ch audio would be something that'd make me switch to OSX more or less completely, since the lack of audio is really a killer.

 

so the driver module that i just proposed would look like

XNU/Darwin > ALSAcompat.kext | (some Heavy Wizardry here) | LinuxAlsaDriver.o