Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 04:23:07PM -0500, David Nusinow wrote:
> 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.
Well put. I think it is arguably not "source code", however, if the
source we are seeing is the result of some sed-like script which
converts a sort of custom #defined MAGIC_NUMBERs to id numbers, and
then removes the #definitions.
Justin
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