Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers

This is awesome!

But it also makes me a little bit sad. The original parallel port and even ISA interface seemed so simple by comparison, with less layers of abstraction. Just run a wire, and write to a port.

I remember when I was a kid, I found a breakout board in an electronics store's random clearance parts bin, with an ISA header on an edge. On a whim I took it home and wire-wrapped a 7-segment LED onto it. Power and ground were easy. Each segment was hooked to a data line, through a simple buffer IC. I cheated and used only a minimal number of address lines to feed the enable port (guessing through a simple AND gate or something). I was amazed when I wrote to that address and it worked the first time!

I look at a protocol like USB, with hundreds of pages, and instead of that curious excitement and enablement I felt back then, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

I sometimes think about this, starting from scratch with a computer hardware and software stack that disallowed all of the layers of abstraction that have built up over the decades.

Yeah many of the abstractions help with performance but maybe there's value giving up much of that performance in exchange for simplicity.

It would be neat to design a whole new contemporary stack from scratch.