On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 16:01 +0200, Helge Hafting wrote: > instead of keeping them secret for no > good reason.
But *that's* the point people keep ignoring: the specs for programming the hardware, in some cases, reveals details about the hardware's implementation that nVidia does *not* want to release (in addition to suggesting their software tricks). Why is it that people *assume* that just the programming docs tells a person nothing about the hardware? We already know that knowing the registers of a card and what those registers do tells you implicit information about the card's design and also reveals implicit information about the design of software that works with the card. How complex the card's registers and programming interface is determines how much you can infer, and the more RISC like or simple the card is and the more that is handled in the driver, the more obviously the design can be inferred just from the programming specs. The aic7xxx chips are a perfect example of this exact same thing. If you know how to program the registers on that card, then you know almost everything about the hardware. It's that simple (and that's a big part of what makes it very fast, lots of room for driver optimizations and enhanced feature support). -- Doug Ledford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://people.redhat.com/dledford - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
