Comment by 3eb7988a1663
5 hours ago
Now that we are out of the Cambrian explosion of computing hardware - are drivers such a concern anymore? Is there any chance we start consolidating on a few core interfaces?
I know nothing of hardware, but as far as I know, my keyboard and mouse work everywhere because there is a formal specification on how human interface devices are supposed to operate.
There are probably good (and anti-competitive) reasons for why hardware still needs bespoke drivers, but from the outside, it seems like something we could address. I have no interest in loading your artisanally crafted Wifi driver.
Game consoles worked a lot like this until around the PS3 era, where the disc/cartridge the game came on was shipping binaries for everything including all the hardware support.
This led to some hilarious implementation shenanigans for the Wii as a transitional console, where the Home button pause screen is not in fact a task switch to some underlying console OS but rather a piece of the SDK that is separately-delivered from each individual game.
ref. https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/wii/
As AI reduces the cost for writing closer to the metal, it's also reducing the cost for creating new metal to target. I suspect we'll see an explosion in new hardware as it's cheaper and easier to design custom solutions.
If you're writing for VM and don't need stuff like GPUs, you can.
For actual real hardware, not really
GPUs, wifi, power/thermal management, firmware. Especially in portable computing there is still a huge amount of hardware support surface area to contend with.