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How Device Drivers Are Reverse Engineered

Posted by Soulskill on from the freeing-your-peripherals dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Linux Voice magazine has published a long article about how people go about reverse engineering drivers for hardware peripherals. They use Python and a USB radio-controlled car to demonstrate, walking us through the entire process. It's a cool, easy-to-follow insight into what often seems to be a rather opaque process.

1 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. Great Knowledge Sharing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nice article, I used a similar technique, and found a reference where someone reverse engineered a usb missile launcher toy. I used that knowledge to buld the USB driver for the Antec Kuhler 920 water cooler, my small contribution to the open source community.

    Of course, the Kuhler Windows App was rather poor quality, as well as the USB implementation. But at least they didn't do anything esoteric, like use USB interrupt transfers, etc. Thank goodness for simple USB transfers.

    Sharing knowledge like this is what the open source community is all about.

    Check me out on sourceforge, kuhler_ctl.