Linux 2.5.x has good support now for user-mode device drivers - XFree being the biggest and most obvious - but also there is support for user-mode input devices and for devices that hang off the parallel port. Three recent developments have made it possible to implement an infrastructure for user-level device drivers that perform almost as well (in some cases better than) in-kernel device drivers. These are; the new pthreads library (and corresponding kernel changes: futexes, faster clone and exit, etc); fast system call support; and IOMMUs.
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