Subject: Re: Behringer [was Re: [linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] RME is no more]
From: Lee Revell (rlrevell_AT_joe-job.com)
Date: Mon Nov 29 2004 - 10:52:51 EET
On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 00:15 -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > When I start to understand the registers that a piece of hardware
> > makes visible I start to understand the architecture of the product
> > itself. If NVidia believes has an advantage over ATI in some area then
> > possibly ATI would copy that and improve their performance. Neither
> > company probably knows the intimate details of the inner workings of
> > the other company's chips and hence thinks they have the advantage.
>
> is it really that hard to reverse engineer the binary only driver?
> Does it make any real world difference for competitors? (my guess it
> that it makes no difference and that companies are either fooling
> themselves or just don't want to bother with legalities of releasing
> info parts of which might be owned by other companies etc.)
For a sound card, it's easy. James Courtier-Dutton reverse engineered
the Audigy LS in a few days. But a 3D driver is literally like rocket
science. It's _hard_. This was discussed on the "open source graphics"
thread on LKML. The consensus was that it's essentially impossible.
Lee
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