Most suitable Unix platform for developing device drivers

I completely newbie in device d开发者_JAVA技巧rivers, so I hope my question is in place, but I need to develop a driver to control some equipment. I was thinking on using Linux as the host OS, but not sure if it is such good idea. I've heard some horror stories about the mess of developing device drivers under Linux. Is there a better alternative under the *Nix world? Or maybe should I check other OSes?

Linux documentation is basically non-existent (similar to other platforms). However, there are a few books which do cover enough information to get started, and the trickier kernel bits can borrowed from other drivers (yay for Open Source).

However, it is one of the easiest current platforms to develop drivers for. There are cleaner models, such as QNX, but that product is sadly near the end (and doesn't support 1/10th as much as hardware as Linux)

What type of device is the driver targetting? Many times you can avoid writing in-kernel drivers (for instance, using libusb in userspace, or the user space IO framework)