Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Tue Jan 30 2007 - 18:36:24 EST


Jeff Garzik wrote:
I guess Nvidia ADMA is pretty much
done now.

Yep. Without docs, even. And its supported by enterprise distros.

Well, the "docs" I was using was a half-finished, broken version of the driver released by NVidia which had to be significantly revised, and the public ADMA spec which the hardware was vaguely based on and which a few things could be inferred from. If NVidia had just released the docs it would have been much easier, I would have gladly written it from scratch. There are still things in the driver that could likely be improved if we had the actual hardware documents, registers that we don't know what half the bits are for, etc.

Having the vendor release a driver without hardware information is fine, as long as it works perfectly or they maintain it when bugs are found. Otherwise, anyone else trying to fix it will end up with an exercise in "why was it doing this? should it be doing this instead?"

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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