Behringer [was Re: [linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] RME is no more]

[Lee Revell]

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