Linux Drivers In Darwin?

Several folks, all anonymous, have been asking about Darwin and Linux drivers, so I figure I should send this out before I'm drowned by more requests: "A discussion has been going on recently on the Darwin Developers mailing list about porting Linux drivers to use the DriverKit on Darwin, due to the wide number of Linux hardware drivers currently available. The problem is that many Linux drivers are under the GPL. My reading of the GPL, especially section 2, is that since the Darwin kernel and the drivers are under separate, incompatible licenses, that they may not be distributed together unless the complete work (the kernel) is licensed under the GPL. Could someone clarify if this is correct, what the options are, and if this applies to distributing a GPL'd dynamically loadable kernel module for the APSL'd kernel (which I read the GPL to say is OK)? "

Send an email to RMS....

[V.]

I'm sure he would be more than happy to answer
your question. Besides, nothing better than
getting your info directly from the FSF.

Different Driver models

[adcm]

The drivers for Darwin are drivers for a Mach based system which is considerably different from both standard BSD and Linux drivers.

It is feasible to use GNU/Hurd drivers with Darwin, but I'm not sure how much work would be required to adapt the two. It would be possible for GNU/Hurd users to adapt the DriverKit totheir platform, which would allow them to have access to a wider range of hardware developers creating drivers for them.