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Comment by toast0

3 months ago

Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc.

If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.

That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.

> It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in.

ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.