> On Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:35:24 +0800 > "xiao dan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Dear Sir: > > Thanks a lot for your reply.Here is the details: > > 1>The hardware we have now is the ATI Radeon 9000(For > > 1>students,money > > is the biggest problem). > > 2>The operating system we currently use is Redhat 9.0. > > 3>What exactly we want to do is to get the work mechanism of the > > 3>ATI > > driver from the binary codes under the OS. > > What do you mean by this? Are you proposing to clean-room reverse > engineer (possibly disassemble) the proprietary driver, and write the > documentation for someone else, who will then write a driver? > There are legal issues involved, so please be very specific about what > you want to do, or are going to do. It may make the difference between > your contribution being a valuable benefit or completely useless for > the community. > > You also said you are a graduate student. Is this supposed to be > related your scientific work, and how? > > As far as I can tell, there already are (fully?) working open source > radeon drivers for 9000 cards. > http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ATI > > I do not know much about the radeon development, but I'm sure you find > the people on dri-devel mailing list (CC'd here). > Perhaps The irregular Radeon Development Companion can provide you > more pointers: http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ > > > 4>The members of our team are all students.We are interested in > > 4>this. > > The biggest problem for us is that how to get the work mechanism > > of the driver from the binary codes or how the dirver works in the > > linux. Waiting for your reply thirstily! Thanks a lot! > > yours, > > shadow
As already said there is already a driver for all radeon up to r200 (up to radeon 9250) which where made with half specification provided by ATI. r300 & r400 chipset are supported through reverse engineered driver (r300 in mesa tree). r500 3d support will come soon. The site gathering information is http://dri.freedesktop.org That said i would strongly discourage anyone to disassemble binary blob when it comes to graphics drivers. Such approach can work for less complex device like wifi card. But for graphics card you got a big API (OpenGL in our case) tightly bound to the driver logic so it becomes very hard to find out how the hw works by looking at source. So my opinion is that the most efficient way to RE and understand graphics cards is by listening and capturing command stream sended to the card and then by a carefull analysis and guess work on this stream. There is no tutorial or guide i know of available out there to describe or to teach anyone how to do so. Nevertheless all tools we use are available on http://dri.freedesktop.org. best, Jerome Glisse ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
