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.

Comments

BeOS

[roachmotel3]

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.

Reverse engineering is easier if you have source

[adb]

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.