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Freeing the Specs?
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.
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 :)
I will bend your mind with my spoon
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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!
A solution to the problem with music today
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".