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Programming IT Technology

Freeing the Specs? 37

Posted by Cliff from the secretive-hardware-and-barriers-to-entry dept.
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.
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Freeing the Specs? More

Freeing the Specs?

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  • Patronise the good guys! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:04PM (#4368899) Homepage Journal
    Make sure that your purchases reflect your values - if you value open specifications then purchase products that do so.

    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)

    • Elsewhere on Slashdot is an article about Nvidia drivers for BSD http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/16/18 55253&mode=nested&tid=152
    • Nvidia produces accaptable Linux drivers

      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)

    by roachmotel3 ( 543872 ) <paulNO@SPAMisaroach.com> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:13PM (#4368964)
    What did BeOS do? I remember that they had really good video drivers for the hardware I had at the time. If I remember right, there is a FreeBeOS project going on now, maybe you could find some resources there.

  • Mass protest (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:16PM (#4368985)

    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.

    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:18PM (#4369001)
    It's not just video cards. For example, recently I've been repairing some industrial electronics, HP power supplies and such, that are 20-30 years old. All the part numbers are custom printed. Diodes with numbers like 2797 that appear nowhere else on this planet for diodes, transistors with cryptic three-digit numbers.

    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)

    by ceejayoz ( 567949 ) <cj@ceejayoz.com> on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:19PM (#4369006) Homepage Journal
    Would petitions help or would it be an exercise in futility?

    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.
  • Well who made the VESA standards anyway? VESA? I love the VESA modes because they're so (ex)universally compatible, well at least they were. Even on Linux I can use TV-out because of VESA modes. Of course you want accelerated drivers, but since cards don't usually have accelerated framebuffers, you need large groups of volunteers to dig up specs for the drivers. Hmm, here's an idea though, a card that has OpenGL, accelerated vesafb, and nothing else. =P

  • Patents, Licences, etc (Score:3, Interesting)

    by QuantumET ( 54936 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:35PM (#4369109)
    Some companies also have licensing, patent, etc issues with regards to releasing spec details.

    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.

    • 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)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
    You have a couple of options.
    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)

    by adb ( 31105 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:45PM (#4369162)

    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)

      by rhost89 ( 522547 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @03:55PM (#4369245)
      OK ive been lurking thought I would explain what my project is, as it would give the readers more insight. Im building a auto pc for my car, not a l33t do nothing OS. I have no grand delusions of overthrowing MS. It is going to be hooked up to the ODBII port and display data in 3D bar/line charts (like fuel injection maps, engine load by rpm, etc) as well as a few other functions like a mp3 player and mabey video. I plan on adding modules as I go so it will be modular and upgradeable. Eventually i plan on integrating it with my PCM so i can change maps on the fly. VESA of coarse is out of the question for display. Thunking back to real mode to update the display is sooo 1995 :)

      • 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!

        --Joe
        • Well there are other stumbling blocks in the way at the moment, im looking for good information about the ford eec-v as well for the MP01 code revision, along with the map and data locations in the eeprom. I have the JTag and have allready dumped the bin. Emulating shouldnt be a problem throught the paralel port but i still have to build the interface circuit, ODBII is the easiest to implement out of everything (standard serial connection) and that circuit is allready built. Id like to integrate everything into a PC104 SBC in a small nice box i can bolt underneith the dash, but finding one that has a video card that i can find the spec sheet on is allmost imposible. Its about a years project alone working on it part time with access to all the information I need, if i cant find the information I need though it will be hopeless. It would take longer to build then I would have the truck.

  • Both good and bad come in shades. (Score:3, Informative)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @04:07PM (#4369358) Homepage Journal
    Even though Matrox is put in the "good" category when it comes to releasing specs, even they're not all the way there. At least back in the G400 days, there was a chunk of closed-source binary that the open-source driver loaded into the "Warp Engine" on the chip/card. Since the closed-source portion didn't execute on the main CPU, no big fuss arose. But it still wasn't completely open or documented.

    From what I've heard, ATI is at least partially forthcoming on hardware spec releases, too.
  • But from Intel and Matrox. Don't buy from nVidia. Then you'll have your specs and the Linux drivers that follow.

    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.

  • "Other manufactures are quite happy to provide the specs for their devices, such as Intel and Matrox."

    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)

    by i_am_nitrogen ( 524475 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @05:03PM (#4369771) Homepage Journal
    3dfx opened up all their specs. If you can find a Voodoo 3 or better around somewhere, and your system will have a full height half length PCI slot available, you can use that. It was easy enough to implement a basic 2D driver for libfbx with the Voodoo 3, and there's the XFree86 source code for 3D support (why oh why are there so few comments in that code??). Finding someone who still has the specs around on their hard drive might be difficult, though. I asked nVidia who has the spec sheets, since they bought much of 3dfx's IP.. They gave me a single sentence reply: "We do not have this information." I bet a Voodoo 3 would be good enough for what you're trying to do, and a Voodoo 5 certainly should be.

    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 gives out its linux driver sources, goto: http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp [nvidia.com] And select your card, the source is available at the top for GLX, and at the way bottom of the kernel

    • Not even close (Score:3, Informative)

      by V. Mole ( 9567 )
      The so-called "Kernel Driver File" source tar.gz contains a big honkin' (>1M) binary module. The supplied source code is simply a shim between the kernel and the binary module. Hardly "Open Source".
  • I think the tough part is not in getting the specs (there are some out there for decent cards),

    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.

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