Re: the SoC GPU driver interview
On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 07:05:06PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> that assumes that there is a limited number of individuals in the
> world with reverse-engineering skills: there isn't. i didn't have
> reverse-engineering skills, but that didn't stop me from trying.
> three years later i had full NT Domains interoperability built into
> samba, including management of /etc/init.d scripts via the standard nt
> gui management tools. i didn't have ARM hardware reverse-engineering
> skills, but that didn't stop me from trying. nine wince smartphones
> later i'd got 98% of drivers done on the 9th phone (the ipaq hw6915)
> in about six weeks flat.
Of course it is a limited number. There is a finite number of people
on the planet. That is a potentially large number I will admit, but
still limited.
> additionally, the guy who started the etnaviv project simply... loved
> the way that libv was working on it, and was inspired to just... get
> on with it. due to the simplicity of the vivante hardware he's
> *overtaken* what libv has achieved, in a very short amount of time,
> and has a *functional* but completely non-optimised gallium3d llvm
> driver that's *faster* than vivante's own proprietary code.
>
> so.... yeah. talking it down just makes people give up. that's not
> good: we need people who *don't* know that it's "difficult". i didn't
> know that MSRPC reverse-engineering was "difficult", which is why i
> started doing it... and once started and having worked with paul to
> get the "welcome to the samba domain" announcement, i sure as s**t
> wasn't going to stop.
I certainly find it facinating what people are managing to do.
> does that sound like a reasonable thing to do, riku - to assume that
> there are people with more skills, enthusiasm and time than we have?
I certainly thinkg that's true.
--
Len Sorensen
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