On Friday 01 September 2006 11:27, Charles M. Hannum wrote: > On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 01:08:13AM +0200, Matthias Kilian wrote: > > They don't have to write device drivers at all, they just should > > write good documentation. > > Unfortunately, the "documentation" often isn't so hot either. I'll > give you an example. Even with both code and "documentation" from > Realtek, we still had to reverse engineer how some parts of the RTL8180 > work. And though it works now, our understanding is still incomplete. > > It is far easier for a manufacturer to spew out a Windows driver > in-house, where they have direct access to the people who designed the > hardware, so this is what they do. The Windows driver model is pretty > much designed around this approach. > > What we really want is not just documentation, but support from their > engineers. The Linux community is starting to get this in some places.
Yes. In many cases, the reason a company doesn't want to release documentation is because it doesn't really exist, except in phone calls or e-mails between the Windows driver writer and the hardware guys. Software folks are notorious for poor documentation. It would be unrealistic for us to expect hardware folks to do a substantially better job. -- John Baldwin
