Lately, I have been in several discussions regarding Intel's stance towards the open source community, and the topic of providing hardware documentation frequently arises. However, since I am not much of a kernel hacker, I do not have a good perspective on what documentation is necessary.
For example, recently Intel was very boastful about demonstrating their ``ongoing commitment to providing free software drivers for Intel hardware''[1]. When I first read the announcement, I was excited, but after re-reading it, I caught on that nowhere did they mention providing documentation---just an open source driver. I emailed Keith Packard about this, but never got a reply. I also found some technical documentation on intel.com about the G965 chipset[2], but it does not appear complete. It seems to explain how to setup DMA to communicate with the card, but not what data should be sent over DMA. Of course, because of my lack of expertise in this field, I may just be looking in the wrong places. Another example appears to be the Intel PRO/1000 MT card. Intel has an open source driver for it, but when I search their web site the most I find are product briefs and white papers[3]. (I know the link is for their PRO/1000 XF card, but that is the page I was directed to when I clicked on ``Technical Documents'' from the PRO/1000 GT page.) On the other hand, there appears to perhaps be sufficient technical documentation on their I/O Controller Hubs for OpenBSD to support them soon after introduction... or maybe they are just easy to reverse engineer? So how open is Intel? Which chipsets do they provide sufficient documentation to fully support? Which chipsets do they provide some documentation, but omit important parts (and what are these parts)? And which chipsets are they completely unproviding for? Thanks. [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-August/017404.html [2] http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/313053.htm [3] http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/pro1000xf_server_adapter_docs.htm
