Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 7 Dec 1999 22:17:06 +0100 | From | Christer Weinigel <> | Subject | Re: Linux headed for disaster? |
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sergey@memco.com wrote:
>Well, windows is still alive B-). I have been looking a TV by using >a Matrox Marvel TV on Win 98. When Matrox would write a driver for LINUX ? >The answer is NEVER B-(((. And I did not hear about a publication of full >specification of that card ( May be I am not right here ).
You're right in that Matrox hasn't published the full specifications of this card. This is a shame, since it would probably give them a lot more goodwill (Matrox have a pretty good reputation anyway, since it is IMHO one of the best video cards for Linux today).
Anyhow, since I'm a sick person at times who actually enjoy trying to reverse engineer strange drivers, I've been looking a bit at the driver for my Matrox Rainbow Runner card. I haven't been able to do much more than figure out where all the memory spaces are, and how to control the chips on the I2C bus (which means that I was able to solder a cable to the video out connector and use the TV tuner on the Matrox card with my old Amiga monitor, so I kind of lost interest in fixing the other stuff then), but I know that if I spent a couple of weeks poking at this driver full time, I'd be able to reverse engineer enough to get quite far on a working driver for Linux.
I also own a couple of old synchronous cards from Newport systems with an onboard 80286 CPU that I only had Novell Netware drivers for. Over a period of a couple of months I've sort of kept poking at this card when I've been bored, and now I actually have a Linux driver which works quite well with this card.
So having a binary only driver is no protection against finding out the APIs. A company that has enough money to design and build PCI hardware can definitely afford the $20000 or so it would take to hire a consultant to do the same job for them? Especially since a hardware design company probably has logic analysers and other tools that make the job much easier. I've done most of my hacking blind without any such tools (but I actually did solder two LEDs to the I2C bus on my Rainbow Runner to see if I was doing the right thing there :-)
/Christer
-- Christer Weinigel Cendio Systems AB Email: wingel@cendio.se Teknikringen 8 Phone: +46-13-21 46 00 583 30 Linköping Fax: +46-13-21 47 00 Sweden [please note that Signum Support has changed its name to Cendio Systems]
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