Freeing the Specs? 37
rhost89 asks: "I'm a hobbyist OS Developer and am appalled at the obscurity and availability of some of the specs sheets for various device groups, specifically video cards. If we want to write video drivers we are almost forced into writing for VESA or for cards that were obsolete 5 years ago, meaning high resolutions that run like a dog, or blazingly fast at 640x480 at 256 colors. Most manufactures hold on to their engineering spec sheets like pirate holds on to their gold doubloons (NVIDIA, and ATI come to mind, here). Other manufactures are quite happy to provide the specs for their devices, such as Intel and Matrox. My question is what can hobbyist OS developers do to get these coveted spec sheets. Would petitions help or would it be an exercise in futility. What else can we do to free this valuable information besides reverse engineering the manufactures binaries?" It's funny how the more things have changed over the last five years, the more things stay the same.
Patronise the good guys! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's for this reason that, although otherwise manufacturers of good product, that NVidia doesen't get any of my business, or any of business that I can influence.
(Nvidia produces accaptable Linux drivers, but due to their closed nature, getting acceptable performance in *BSD is next to impossible)
Re:Patronise the good guys! (Score:1)
Re:Patronise the good guys! (Score:2)
I have to disagree with that. I run VMWare on my computer which has an Nvidia MX400 card. When the thing goes full screen it sometimes crashes X. When it switches screen resolutions, it displays garbage on the screen. After I exit VMware, if I ctl-alt-F1 switch to a console, the screen has garbage on it.
These are the Nvidia drivers that I downloaded from the Nvidia site, and inserted into a plain vanilla kernel.
The thing runs fast, and flawlessly if I'm only working with X. But when VMware goes full screen it's less than satisfactory.
BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:BeOS (Score:1)
www.openbeos.org
Re:BeOS (Score:1)
Mass protest (Score:5, Funny)
Would petitions help or would it be an exercise in futility. What else can we do to free this valuable information besides reverse engineering the manufactures binaries?
Take a cue from the pros: organize mass protests. Make sure to spend lots of time on the costumes and effegies that you will use. Use PDAs and cell phones so that you can reroute your riot around the police. Beef up your numbers by allowing other groups to co-riot with you (anti-globalism, anti-war, save-the-whales, etc.) Form a human chain and have the women scream like murder when the cops try to pull them apart.
Remember, you need to draw attention to your cause. Only when footage of your group dressed up in silly costumes and running around screaming shows up on TV will the masses understand and respect your viewpoint on this important issue.
Re:Mass protest (Score:1)
Also, be sure to have some number of attractive people running around naked (or possibly only in undies) with slogans painted on their bodies. This will ensure that the photos and videos will forever live on.
It's the same anywhere. (Score:3, Interesting)
While they tried everything to keep people from finding the correct data sheet for a part #, now they just hold on tighter to the data sheet. Back then it was easier to reverse engineer a device when you had the double sided PCB there to trace out the circuit.
Electronics these days is all about an idea implemented in a gigantic ASIC or gate array... Easier to duplicate. If you can figure out how ATI does something in a chipset, you can probably just copy it into a million+ gate FPGA. That's tougher to do with discrete analog components.
petitions? hah... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen an online petition work. If it makes you feel like you're doing something, go for it, but don't expect results.
Re:petitions? hah... (Score:2)
VESA (Score:1)
Patents, Licences, etc (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen people claim that nVidia, especially, can't provide open source drivers because they use methods licenced from elsewhere in their code. Whether that's true, and whether that's the only reason they don't open their drivers, who knows.
But if that is the case, it's unlikely that any amount of protest will help, if they're legally bound to keep this stuff secret.
Re:Patents, Licences, etc (Score:1)
I heard that they wouldn't release the specs because they hadn't got licenses for patented techniques, or at least they were fearful that they might be using patented techniques unknowingly, and if they did release their specs then someone would come out of the woodwork claiming patent infringement.
Take that with a pinch of salt. I make no claims as to the truth of it.
Video Drivers. (Score:2, Insightful)
1. You can use a video board that is easy to support or...
2. Design your video system so that it can use x windows drivers. You would get a lot of access to video drivers quickly.
Reverse engineering is easier if you have source (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't encountered a video card in years that didn't have a solid free 2D driver in XFree86. If you're working on one of those l33t non-Unix free OSes, you can probably get all the information you need from the X driver and (for those that have it) the Linux framebuffer driver.
The world of 3D is different, of course. nVidia cards, for example, still have binary-only 3D drivers as far as I recall. In those cases, as a practical matter, you might start by wrapping the binary-only drivers in a Linux emulation layer.
Re:Reverse engineering is easier if you have sourc (Score:4, Informative)
[OT] carputer (Score:1)
If you ever get one working, email me. I'd love to see it in action. Hell, I'd love to have one for my car!
--JoeRe:[OT] carputer (Score:1)
Both good and bad come in shades. (Score:3, Informative)
From what I've heard, ATI is at least partially forthcoming on hardware spec releases, too.
Seems obvious. (Score:2)
Of course, if you can't help yourself but, buy nVidia, then know what you are getting into. You won't change nVidia's mind unless they see that they are losing market share to Intel/Matrox in the Linux community.
Re:Seems obvious. (Score:2)
Matrox does NOT release their specs (Score:2, Interesting)
Many people (including myself) have consistantly tried to get Matrox to release the specifications for their now 5 year old video capture cards Rainbow Runners, that are now obsolete. Matrox has refused. Matrox does not provide support for these adequate cards for Linux or any version of Windows above Win98 or NT.
For Refrence:
http://penultima.org/~rrsvideo/news.html
I would hope that any decent company in the future will be kind enough to provide hardware specs for things that are as obsolete as this, but Matrox has refused, I believe, because they want their users to upgrade, even though there isn't a physical reason to.
3dfx specs (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone has the Voodoo 3, 4, and/or 5 spec sheet PDF's around, let this guy know, and let me know too!
Nvidia's Drivers are Opensource (Score:1)
Not even close (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not even close (Score:1)
Specs not necessarily the problem (Score:1)
the tough part is, imesho, in writing the whole 3D infrastructure within your OS.
I for one have not seen a single hobby-os with decent 3D support, despite there being specs out there.
There's more to a 3D infrastructure than drivers alone, infact, if you re-use the x drivers like someone else suggested, your driver problems are pretty much solved.