Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.