Boyd Lynn Gerber schrieb: > On Tue, 21 Feb 2006, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > >>As a side note, binary only drivers are an interesting target for reverse >>engineering. I already did that once and the new GPL driver was faster, >>more stable and (most important) free. > > Yes, but to create them in a Clean Room Enviroment is not easy and takes > money. Where is this going to come from. I saw where stuff had to be > removed because it did not addhere to the Clean Room test and could be > seen as violating ...
The reverse engineering I did back then was totally cleanroom because that was the only way to get the driver into Linus' kernel. The hard part was keeping the separation between the teams, but we managed it with zero budget. Fortunately, there are only a few classes of drivers where reverse engineering is really hard. Graphics drivers come to mind immediately. Network/ISDN/modem drivers, on the other hand, are easy if you only need basic functionality. The hard part of modems/ISDN/DSL are the DSP algorithms, but these could theoretically live in userspace in a task with realtime priority. Some people believe that even graphics drivers can have the large secret parts in userspace, exhibiting only a well-defined opensource interface from the kernel. However, it has been said that this would kill performance. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
