>From: "Alex Deucher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >If you have any way of working with hardware vendors to get them to >provide specs, or even better, open source driver code, it would be >much appreciated.
The more you ask, the less likely you get them. The driver code includes software algorithms which does API specific operations. We really don't need them. We neither need detailed hardware information when it means the chip design details. We basically just need to know how to enable/disable things in the graphics pipeline, how to set variables, how to send graphics data, etc. We actually don't need to understand the meaning of the registers and the like: we just need to know the sequences of numbers which needs to be sent in order to achieve something. But as written here, somebody with NDA wrote open source driver enchangements and is unable to publish. If he does not explane anything in the code, it is the same what I suggested in the above paragraph. ATI also has "Closer-to-the-metal API CTM" mentioned in http://pharr.org/matt/talks/graphicshardware.pdf The talk briefly plays with the idea of "Has the time come to kill the graphics API and expose the hardware instead?". Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
