hint from Nouveau project
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| gus3 Feb 01, 2012 7:43 PM EDT |
The nVidia proprietary driver didn't need to be reverse-engineered. The developers of Nouveau simply wrote tools to capture the driver's requests to the different cards. Hopefully the same can be done for the various SoC's. |
| Khamul Feb 01, 2012 8:24 PM EDT |
@gus3: Um, that pretty much IS reverse-engineering, or at least one method which can be labeled that. It's not quite the same as looking at code in a disassembler, but it's also totally different from simply writing code to a spec, because you're having to reverse-engineer the spec by seeing how the original program works in practice using a tracing tool. It's the same method used to create the reverse-engineering Broadcom drivers IIRC; one team using tracing methods to see how the hardware worked and how the official driver talked to it, and then wrote a spec. A second team took this spec and wrote a driver with it. |
| gus3 Feb 01, 2012 9:16 PM EDT |
Then would you call the Wine project "reverse-engineered"? Because the Wine devs prefer to call it a "re-implementation" of the Windows API. |
| jhansonxi Feb 02, 2012 12:31 AM EDT |
Wine is both. Re-implementation of the API, reverse-engineering of undocumented API functions and bug workarounds for Windows apps. |
| Khamul Feb 02, 2012 12:56 AM EDT |
Exactly. The publicly-published API doesn't need reverse engineering, you just write new code to do the same things as all the functions in the API. The API is a specification. But when there's undocumented API calls, that has to be reverse engineered. |
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