Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 04:12:50PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> Good point. Similarly, there is a difference between actively
> obfuscated "source code" (which isn't the preferred form of
> modification), and poorly written code. The latter, although you may
> prefer to not modify it, is arguably the preferred form of
> modification.
>
> Just because the code doesn't use #defines or enums doesn't
> necessarily make it obfuscated; it may just be that Vojkovich sees
> that as too indirect, and prefers to write outb(0x3241, 0x51) because
> he happens to know the port ID numbers and values off the top of his
> head.
>
> Is it *actively* obfuscated, or just not as clean as you would like?
> If it is actively obfuscated (has been run through a sed script to
> remove whitespace, or similar), then someone needs to ask nv for the
> real source.
>
> Is there someplace we can download the code (call it what you like)
> without also downloading the rest of X11?
I've just taken a quick (~10min) look through it. It's definitely readable, and
makes sense for the most part as far as I could see. It's got comments and is
fairly cleanly written. The caveat is that there are a lot of magic numbers
scattered about the code. Some are commented (such as specific chip ID's) and
others are not, since they're things like bitmasks. I quickly looked through
the ati driver code as well, and while it seems to have significantly less of
these, those that are there are nicely commented telling you where they came
from. No such niceties in the nv code. Still, nothing that would make me call
it obfuscated.
I'll see about taking a closer look at parts to see if it actually makes sense,
but so far it looks fine to me. As it is, I don't see any difference between
this and any other vendor not releasing hardware specs and yet a Free driver
exists. Not a good thing, but not non-free either.
- David Nusinow
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