Don Becker, of Beowulf fame, mentioned in a SearchOpenSource.com interview last month that “You’re always chasing device support. You always need to add just that one last device driver. That will never go away, and imagining that virtualization will make it go away is a mistake.”

While it’s true that new devices will constantly hit the market and need driver support, the real question is at what level those devices are integrated with the system. Don’s statement leads me to believe he’s proposing that application level software be rebuilt to support new hardware and that makes me shutter because it’s a 25 year step backwards.

I know it shows my age, but I can remember the days of the PDP 11 and the System 36 when it was common to tightly integrate applications and hardware. For instance, I remember upgrading a DEC accounting system when they released the new RL05 disk drive. They’d literally built the disk seek times into to the application as fatal timeouts.

Sounds extreme? It’s not so long ago that we had to enter bad sector maps for disk drives on our PCs. Or, perhaps you remember having to switch extended memory modes to run different applications.

I have to respectfully disagree with Don. While new drivers will always be needed, it’s the job of OS developers to provide a level of abstraction that keeps application developers from having to know about them, and more importantly from having to rewrite code to support them.