AMD to open up graphics specs [LWN.net]

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:01 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: AMD to open up graphics specs by Thalience
Parent article: AMD to open up graphics specs

Apropos drivers written under NDA, I know of a case where the developers of a driver got specs only under an NDA. They assumed the specs would be full of detailed, third-party data. Far from that, it was a hastily thrown together bunch of loose sheets, with handwritten amendments and margin notes. They speculated later that the NDA was just out of shame ;-)

I've also heard from cases where the specs just don't exist at all: All there is is the experience of the people that developed the hardware and drivers, plus an unorganized list of "this works", "this doesn't", with lots of gaps.

Just look at what is done kernel-wise: The talks from LinuxConf.eu about user-kernel interface that Jon reported on are precisely about there not being enough documentation on (new) system calls...

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Hardware without Specifications

Posted Sep 5, 2007 19:23 UTC (Wed) by jwmittag (guest, #43097) [Link]

I've also heard from cases where the specs just don't exist at all: All there is is the experience of the people that developed the hardware and drivers, plus an unorganized list of "this works", "this doesn't", with lots of gaps.

Dirk Hohndel, Intel's Open Source Guy, mentioned something like this in his LinuxTag 2005 Talk. Essentially, the guys writing the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Linux driver had to reverse engineer just like everyone else would have, even though they are also Intel engineers.

jwm

Remember their slogan ...

Posted Sep 6, 2007 1:33 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

"Only the paranoid survive" is Intel's motto (and their competitors feel much the same way).

A lot of the big chip designers don't trust their own people with the company's own designs; everything is need-to-know. And then there are all of the details of operation that simply aren't written down anywhere; the driver guys ask the hardware guys questions when they get stuck, and sometimes comments in the driver is pretty much the only documentation for some of the tricky bits, other than comments in the (Verilog or VHDL) RTL source code, and there's no way anyone's going to get to see that.