VESA

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:41 am

Could you PLEASE remove the formatting from that quote!

Try Googling for the VESA Protected Mode Interface.

jal · Post by **jal** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 2:56 am

zaleschiemilgabriel wrote:By "to-the point" I mean this: If YOU haven't written an NVIDIA driver, or YOU haven't used the Linux module in your OS, shut the F up! If you HAVE, or you know someone who HAS written an NVIDIA driver or used the Linux kernel module successfully, please tell me. A link to some kind of tutorial would be good too.

You are being extremely rude, and there's no excuse for that. Also, quite recently, on this forum, I posted links to all known open source nVidia projects (after someone, again, didn't use Google). If you can name that thread, but came up empty, fine. But I bet you didn't even try searching (hint: it's called NVIDIA documentation - wasn't that hard now, was it?).

JAL

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:34 am

And please, I'm expecting a to-the-point answer on this! I'm not ready to give up on this ****-**** of a forum just yet. Razz
By "to-the point" I mean this: If YOU haven't written an NVIDIA driver, or YOU haven't used the Linux module in your OS, shut the F up! If you HAVE, or you know someone who HAS written an NVIDIA driver or used the Linux kernel module successfully, please tell me. A link to some kind of tutorial would be good too.
That second part goes for any other Linux module...
I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVEN'T DONE!

You're expecting a tutorial on writing a driver for a range of card without documentation and where the only official drivers for linux are binary-only? Interesting. Would you like me to remove the silver spoon from your arse, or will you deign to do it yourself?

This is a civil forum, there was absolutely no need whatsoever for your outburst. The OP had quite blatantly not searched properly and was expecting an answer on a platter. That's not how the world works. I, and most of this forum, work for a living and post here during 5 minute breaks or our lunch hour. We don't have time to pander to pretentious pre-pubescent script kiddies (which is quite blatantly what you are), and nor would we want to.

I'm fully expecting that you'll be banned from this forum reasonably soon, so I hope you see this post before the door hits you in the arse.

Let me end by saying this. I don't care about what you haven't done, what you have done, or what you will do, ever.

Hope this helps,

JamesM

zaleschiemilgabriel · Post by **zaleschiemilgabriel** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:37 am

Sorry if I'm being rude, but I really hate this proprietary driver thing. It's been "driving" me crazy. And then I had a little discussion on this forum about licenses that I think is just bull***t...
I already saw the post you mentioned and I already knew about the Nouveau project. Unless someone can guarantee that the Nouveau driver will work with my board and that it won't burn it in the process, I'm not ready to use it. I can only trust drivers that are proven to work.
IMO the nouveau project is not fully legal, as it must be using some kind of reverse-engineering techniques or other non-legal stuff.
Well, I decided to go with SVGA real-mode initialization in my OS, but if there's something better...

JackScott · Post by **JackScott** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:39 am

zaleschiemilgabriel wrote: I can only trust drivers that are proven to work.

Then you're not going to have much fun in the world of OSDev.

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:56 am

Yayyak wrote:
zaleschiemilgabriel wrote: I can only trust drivers that are proven to work.
Then you're not going to have much fun in the world of OSDev.

Quite. I suggest you stick to writing 3D game demos...

Sorry if I'm being rude, but I really hate this proprietary driver thing. It's been "driving" me crazy. And then I had a little discussion on this forum about licenses that I think is just bull***t...

A company is allowed to do whatever it wants with the code it pays people to write. If you want something better, set up a graphics card company, spend millions of dollars designing and manufacturing a chipset, then make your drivers open source.

JackScott · Post by **JackScott** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:58 am

Windows costs millions to develop. That's why they make people pay for it.
Food costs money to grow. That's why they make people pay for it.
Petrol costs money to ... ? That's why it keeps increasing in price.

zaleschiemilgabriel · Post by **zaleschiemilgabriel** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 4:22 am

So you're saying that NVIDIA sells their driver specification to anyone who wants it so that people with money can buy it and write drivers for their OS or that they write drivers for anyone? I don't think so.So it's not about the money. They just don't care.

...And if I had a video-board manufacturing company, I would make the specs public, so that everyone could do their best at writing wonderful things with <my-supposed-brand-name> support. That would be an advantage for advertising the products. It would be like: "Hey look at the great stuff (OS interface/3D game/whatever

) this/that guy has implemented for that video board! I'm gonna' get me one of those."

I think the best example of this would be the Compiz project. It is being advertised in the Linux community and I think that has influenced video-board buyers a bit. If Linux had more games, it would be the best OS platform and it would influence video board sales even more... But that's just what I think.

JackScott · Post by **JackScott** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 4:25 am

Or on the other hand, somebody might create some awful Linux driver for the hardware that randomly damages 1 in 10,000 video cards. Then it could be more like "Look what this programmer idiot did to my video card!"

Users will look for somebody to blame. The most obvious place to look is the source of everything: the video card manufacturer. By only letting certain people get to the specs, you get more control over the quality of the product.

zaleschiemilgabriel · Post by **zaleschiemilgabriel** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 5:15 am

Then that's Linux's fault...

Brendan · Post by **Brendan** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:02 am

Hi,

It does make me wonder - if someone has proven they are capable of creating good quality video drivers (e.g. they've already written good quality drivers for Intel and/or ATI video) and are willing to sign NDAs (and write closed source drivers), then would a company like Nvidea provide documentation? They'd have no reason not to....

Cheers,

Brendan

jal · Post by **jal** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:12 am

zaleschiemilgabriel wrote:IMO the nouveau project is not fully legal, as it must be using some kind of reverse-engineering techniques or other non-legal stuff.

You obviously have no clue as to what is legal and what isn't. Reverse engineering, especially clean-room reverse engineering, is perfectly legal.

JAL

jal · Post by **jal** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:17 am

Brendan wrote:It does make me wonder - if someone has proven they are capable of creating good quality video drivers (e.g. they've already written good quality drivers for Intel and/or ATI video) and are willing to sign NDAs (and write closed source drivers), then would a company like Nvidea provide documentation? They'd have no reason not to....

A good reason would be that they just do not want to invest any time in dealing with such people. They have no interest whatsoever in getting NDAs signed and providing specs. Also, like ATI/AMD, the specs may actually be just a bunch (if not hundreds) of internal memos, e-mails, documents, HTML pages etc. It's rather hard to hand those over. And what in case something is unclear? Do you give such a person tech support? If so, to what level? Etc. etc. No, I can see perfectly well why nVidia is not interested in providing any documentation that way. At least when it is opened up, like AMD/ATI (and Intel of course, which is the master of good technical documentation), they can say "here it is, for free, do whatever you like with it and don't ask any questions".

JAL

zaleschiemilgabriel · Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:29 am

jal wrote:
zaleschiemilgabriel wrote:IMO the nouveau project is not fully legal, as it must be using some kind of reverse-engineering techniques or other non-legal stuff.
You obviously have no clue as to what is legal and what isn't. Reverse engineering, especially clean-room reverse engineering, is perfectly legal.

JAL

Hi,
I read something on Wikipedia about clean-room design.

If I write my driver by disassembling a Windows or Linux driver without using any proprietary specs, by only applying my own interface to the driver mod, is this perfectly legal?

01000101 · Post by **01000101** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:38 am

yes.
as long as you stay away from trying to mimic the reverse-engineered programms lower-level calls, you should be safe. If you went out and tried to disassemble and remake the windows bootloader or something, then the grey area of reverse-engineering can turn black fast.