Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Jeff Garzik
2005-11-22T16:38:51Z

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:33:48AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 November 2005 08:30, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:07:12AM +0200, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> > > Historically hackers were not too good at raising funds.
> > >
> > > Maybe we should use stuff which we are good at? Forcedeth
> > > is a nice precedent. 2d and especially 3d engines
> > > may be significantly harder to reverse engineer,
> > > but people can scale rather nicely, as kernel development shows. ;)
> > >
> > > Then write specs from gained knowledge and put it on a web page.
> >
> > Yes, IMO this is the only realistic path, without cooperation from
> > ATI/NVIDIA.
> >
> > This is why I dislike the ATI r300 rev-eng effort: I cannot find any
> > "Chinese wall": one team rev-engs the hardware and writes a doc.
> > Another team writes the drivers from the docs.
>
> If they're reverse engineering the hardware, why would you need a chinese
> wall? Compaq was turning x86 assembly code into x86 assembly code and had to
> prove that the new x86 code didn't infringe the copyright on the old x86
> code. They weren't turning port I/O and DMA logs into C code...

Chinese wall is far more secure legally.

Linux doesn't need more headaches from open legal questions.

It worked for forcedeth, Broadcom wireless, and several other
projects... it results in a better driver, too.

Jeff