Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Dave Airlie
2005-12-06T21:55:15Z

>
> The risk is that by reading the disassembled binary and rewriting it a
> programming might actually be deemed to have copied code if they
> accidentally just reproduce the original implementation.
>
>
> Often of course disassembly is the hard way to solve the problem. Firing
> up the driver with analyser tools and studying how it works can be far
> more informative. With the ATI R3xx work asking the binary driver to
> draw a wide range of triangles and monitoring the command queue output
> for each request provides very good info, while attempting to deciphers
> megabytes of windows 3D driver code, which is likely to contain self
> modifying or JIT generated pipelines, is going to be extremely hard
> work.
>

I can pretty much guarantee nobody is stupid enough to even think
about attaching a debugger or disassembler to fglrx, doing black-box
reverse engineering is sufficent for everything, and as the r300 is
derived in many respects from the r200, we have a lot of info from
it..

Dave.