Re: apple hardware docs.
> In any case, what is extremely ridiculous is that for many "stupid"
> things like fans, thermal control or microphone/sound, they have *nix
> stuff programmed, BUT they still don't release it under the GPL, so you
> need a really good bunch of gurus to hack the stuff up.
Actually, the complete source code of Apple sound drivers is
open sourced in Darwin.
Our driver is a mess, mostly because of the bazillions different setups
of the sound chips on apple motherboards that we try to all driver from
a single driver, and because of history too :)
Several people proposed to take over the driver in the past couple of
years, but so far, all of them sort of vanished after hacking a bit on
it, I suppose hacking this driver is a good way to get quickly sick of
programming :)
Currently, dmasound is maintained "by default" by Christoph Hellwig. I
suspect he doesn't have much time to dedicate to it though.
I personally don't have the time & dedication necessary to do the
necessary complete rewrite of it. Alsa could be a good alternative,
though it seems to still have a fair amount of problems on some
machine models.
> (sound in a laptop cannot be "really" good anyway, so I added it to the
> "silly things" list, specially the microphone thing, because it is
> really annoying for me to have ALSA and not be able to use it...)
>
>
> I understand that they want secrecy or whatever they want with their
> business model regarding Quartz and their freaking cool "visual" stuff
> ("their X-windows", etc). But c'mon... we bought a $3000 laptop already!
> We are running whatever we want in it, plus most of the time, MacOSX,
> they already made _a lot_ of money from us! And they still make us run
> "crippled hardware" because although the work of those gurus is amazing,
> it is _obviously_ hard to match that of the engineers who designed the
> piece of hardware milimeter by milimeter...
>
> > > I hope you find this information useful. If you require any additional
> > > info
> > > rmation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
> > >
> > > Best Regards,
> > >
> > > Damian Harney
> > > Apple Developer Connection
> > > Worldwide Developer Relations
> >
> > If anyone needs help with writing a device driver for anything Apple
> > related, it seems like they would help out where they could.
> >
> > At least, thats the impression that I get. If I was better at writting
> > low-level stuff I would attempt this. Can anyone suggest any docs?
>
> Regarding the G4 Powerbook laptops, I found quite nice the stuff in
> here:
>
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerBook_G4/index.html
>
> and in pdf,
>
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerBook_G4/PowerBookG4.pdf
>
> But, again, they are not (OBVIOUSLY) a detailed reference guide on the
> electronics of the G4. I mean, I just took a course on microprocessors
> and embedded systems, and the lab work was on a nifty ARM board
> co-designed by the University of Manchester and the University of New
> South Wales; well, not only _all_ of the ARM cross-compiling software,
> EMULATION of the board, etc, was GPL software (ARM GNU tools and komodo
> program for running the programs on the board plus emulating the board
> too) but they gave us a CD with _ALL_ the low level docs of the board,
> down to the microprocessor level (ARM7TDMI), I/O, IRQs, etc. Apple
> cannot provide aaaaall that much detail, since I guess they want to
> remain unique in their hardware design, but they could publish, at
> least, either the source for the "silly parts" or more details on how to
> write it.
>
> > Best Regards,
> >
> > - Mick
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> J. Javier Maestro
> <jjmaestro@computer.org>
> http://rigel.homelinux.com
--
Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
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