>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]- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/