On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 05:40:29PM +0200, Wouter Bijlsma wrote: > Hi, > > I was just wondering if someone has tried to do some reverse > engineering on the windows display drivers for the Radeon IGP320/340. > As far as I understand the IGP320/340 is based on the Radeon 7000 > (R100)? I'm not a display driver developer, but doesn't this mean that > apart from some differences in the interface to the chipset a DRI > driver for the IGP chipset would be largely the same as the 7000 > driver? I noticed that the Windows drivers are universal (there's one > driver dll for all R100 based cards), so maybe it would be possible to > disassemble it to find the code that detects the chipset and sets up > the hooks to address it and to find the differences with the 7000 > chips?
I really don't know much about the IGP and its position relative with the other chipsets. I'd just want to comment on the Reverse engineering (RE) which is a sensitive issue. IANAL, but spite RE is in general allowed by most contries laws some aspects are not, especially in the presence of shrink-wrap EULAs which specifically prohibit them. I've did some research since this issue seems to be more relevant as both NVIDIA and ATI opting to use closed-source drivers for Linux, and here are some interesting links on the subject: http://www.softpanorama.org/SE/reverse_engineering_links.shtml http://www.badsoftware.com/reveng.htm and particular this one: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/l&e%20reveng3.pdf In this last paper, pp. 69, it says that the European Union has chosen to nullify those terms in the EULAs which forbid RE. Elsewhere, my impression is that black box RE is safer from a legal POV, i.e., treat the driver as a black box, and intercept/monitor its communication with the OS and hardware. This is more difficult to set up, but in any case it's a combination of both techniques that usually give good results. > If this would be feasible, I'd be happy to spend some work on it. Not > that I pretend to be able to code a working 3D driver, but if it turns > out the existing 7000 driver could handle 3D on the IGP320/340 with > minor modifications I might be able to get something to work. > > I would really, REALLY like to have 3D support under linux on my brand > new laptop ;-) I already inquired ATI about linux support, but I don't > have the impression they are very willing to provide chipset specs... Perhaps someone else here could comment on that. It would definetly be better if we could get to an arrangement with ATI rather than trying to do our own thing. José Fonseca ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Etnus, makers of TotalView, The best thread debugger on the planet. Designed with thread debugging features you've never dreamed of, try TotalView 6 free at www.etnus.com. _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
