In article <1118483094.b509c54d0d9fdb689211b19c303046d4@teranews>,
Paul Schlyter <pausch.NO@SPAM.saaf.se> wrote:
Otoh you'll have to get updated device drivers whenever there's a major
change in architecture. This is manageable in the UNIX world, where
relatively few hardware devices are connected. But the PC world is
different - nowadays there are so many different hardware devices you can
buy cheaply and attach (most often to the USB port). And e.g. every brand
of digital camera seem to require its own device driver. A major
architecture change may then mean not being able to use perhaps half of
these devices after the change, because the manufacturer didn't supply an
updated driver.
That's a fair point, but the drivers shouldn't need much more than a
re-build either; the peripheral hardware won't change much (and it's the
same these days on most computers, PCs, Macs, Workstations or anything
else - it's a commodity computing world we live in)
In fact, driver development should get easier for peripheral
manufacturer now; they write one bit that talks to the hardware, which
should now be the same code on both an x86 Mac and a Wintel, and
another bit which talks to the host OS, which will need writing
separately for Windows and OS X, just as it is now.
But that OS-dependent part will build fine from the same source code on
both PPC and x86, so we shouldn't have a problem.
In theory. Lazy programmers may make it become a problem.