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It's all about the specs
By Dirk Hohndel (Intel) (21 posts) on February 21, 2008 at 8:48 am
Interesting post from Jon Corbett over at LWN (depending on when you read this, you might need an LWN account - which is a must have, IMHO, so go ahead, subscribe). Anyway, what Jon explains is that there is ongoing debate on whether the community should actually reverse engineer hardware in order to support it or whether that would mean encouraging the wrong behavior in hardware vendors.
In the interest of full disclosure, of course I am one of the people who have talked about this topic many times in public and who actually talked to Jon about this at linux.conf.au. But I don't think that should stop me from commenting on it here :-)
Fundamentally, some vendors release decent documentation to their components (note, Intel recently released the Programmers Reference Manual for our latest graphics chips), while others don't. Yet right now more volunteers and community members are focusing on and supporting the chips from vendors that don't release specs. That's backwards, right? It reduces the incentive for vendors to release decent specs. In order to help our goals ("our" being "the open source community" in this context), we should support those vendors who release specs. And those are many more than just Intel, but I hope you'll forgive me for not linking to competitors' sites from an Intel blog...
Releasing specs was what got Linux started almost 27 years ago (Linus used the Crawford/Gelsinger book on Programming the 80386 when he began working on the Linux kernel). And it's what enables innovation. Smart developers shouldn't be wasting their time to figure out how to program chips. They should focus on creating new exciting things using those chips. And it should be in the best interest of the manufacturer to help them do so.
PS: in case you are wondering what I have been doing (since I haven't posted here in almost a year) - I simply spent more time on my personal blog and (oops) forgot to update my blog at work...
Categories: Open Source
Comments (1) 
By Ray Zed Blog on February 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Donald Melanson: Fundamentally, some vendors release decent documentation to their components (note, Intel recently released the Programmers Reference Manual for our latest graphics chips), while others don’t. Yet right now more volunteers and community