[coLinux-devel] How necessary is the TAP driver?

[Chris D. <da...@ya...>]

First off, let me say thanks to everone working on this project.  I have played
with it a bit and it is quite cool.  I did some VERY informal benchmarking with
some neural network stuff that I wrote and got some nice numbers.  I ran the
program under cygwin and then recompiled and ran it under colinux.  It looked
like there was only a 15% performance hit under colinux.  (the program uses a
mix of floats, ints, arrays and linked lists with a little bit of file I/O if
you were wondering)  

Anyway... to my question...  I guess I am wondering if the TAP driver is ONLY
needed for networking.  That is, I know that if you try to run colinux without
it, it dies.  Could colinux be configured to continue "booting" even if the
driver is not installed?   Why?  I was just thinking about how cool it would be
if I had colinux and a small disk image on my keychain flash drive.  Then I
could just plug it into whatever Windows computer I happen to have handy, click
an icon and have linux up and running.  No drivers required.  (nice if it not
YOUR computer) I realize that the xml configuration file has the location of
the disk image hard coded, but it would be easy enough to address that.  And
yes, I know that flash has a "limited" number of write cycles... Just wondering
if it can be done.  Thoughts?

Again, thank you for such a great project.
--Chris



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There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." --Dave Barry
home: http://www.dahlweb.net