> 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.
Keith Packard works on X, but he also works for Intel, right? No man can have two masters. But he does. You can expect that X will become more closed. It is becoming a serious problem -- many senior X developers now work for video card vendors. > 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. That's right -- sufficient documentation has not been made available. > > 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.) Intel, Broadcom, and Marvell are the only three vendors still left who fail to publish documentation for their ethernet chips. (OK, there are a few others, but they are mostly for very rare new products, and people like jsg will soon win them over). These vendors do help with fixing the drivers in some limited scope. And that's the problem. They only help a little. If they wrote complete bug-free drivers and promised to maintain them for us forever it would be one story, but that is not what is going on. > 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? Whatever division makes the host bridges does a fairly good job of releasing information. Of course there are two documents for these. One is the primary programming document, which they make available. The other is an extended document for BIOS writers, and this is never made available. Still, the primary document is largely good enough for our needs. This is the only division of Intel that is open. > 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? Intel only really provides the pci host bridge documentation. Everything else is closed. Intel hopes that if it keeps telling saying "we are open" that the Linux people will keep believing them. Let's prove them wrong.
