Hey all!
Ive never done much driver stuff before so im here to as some sorta general questions about it~
I have a second monitor on my laptop, its a Mimo Magic Touch and I really like using it.
(Image)
Im trying to get it working with manjaro on my laptop and im having troubes. I found people have gotten it to work on the raspberry pi: (link)
Im wondering if i can maybe steal their driver? Since the monitor connects over USB, i dont think i need to worry too much about the arm vs x86_64?
Id love to hear what you have to say! Ive never played with driver stuff before, and im really interested in hearing about what you think i should try next, maybe i need to write my own driver? Thanks!
Looks like i cant add links or images… but if you search online for “Mimo magic touch linux” or raspberry pi, you’ll find the same stuff i did.
Kinda weird but, ok… i guess i dont need links?
You’d be wrong. The driver doesn’t run on the monitor; it runs on the host processor, and aarch64 is quite a different thing to x86-64. For starters, ARM is a RISC architecture, whereas x86-64 is officially a CISC ─ it behaves like a RISC internally but its instruction set is CISC.
I’m afraid the two architectures are incompatible. 
I know that’s not where the driver runs~ Sorry for being confusing!
And what I meant was, because the unit communicates over USB, and doesn’t speak over a format that would be specific to arm or x86 instructions like, maybe pci? I figured I would have a better chance implementing it in my system :3
But correct me if I’m wrong there, again sorry for being confusing.
There’s still a difference in how you would then address the PCI bus. Having the hardware communicate with one another is one thing, but having the operating system access that hardware is another. That’s what drivers are for, and the drivers have to run in the instruction set of the underlying processor.
An additional problem is that when it comes to hardware drivers, then we’re most often not even talking of portable C code that you can simply recompile on the target platform, but of routines in assembler, and assembler isn’t portable.
I cant link it but the driver does seem to have code in there? or at least it has a bunch of folders that look compilable… I’m just not sure how, if that is what they are or how I would build them for my system since I think I see a lot of xorg in there and I’m using wayland and I’m not even sure I could use that display system anyway. :c