On Sep 08, 06 10:59:22 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 04:36:22PM +0200, Matthias Hopf wrote:
There are no specs, so they cannot be published.
Release cycles are too fast, there is no documentation even within ATI or NVIDIA.
You want to tell me that the driver developers at these companies work with the trial-and-error method? --- Well, at least that would explain the quality of their drivers...
Well, not exactly trial-and-error. They probably have design specs, but what is actually delivered in silicon is typically quite a bit off. Some things turn out not to be implementable, some trigger a slow path, some things are buggy. You have to work around in the driver, and I assume that approx. 30-50% of the code is about workarounds. This is only an educated guess, so don't take my words for granted. Of course some errors are only found by trial-and-error, but that is the case in the whole software industry. Even if you use formal methods, in that case the driver might do exactly what you specified, but what you specified is not necessarily what you actually wanted... Matthias -- Matthias Hopf <mhopf@suse.de> __ __ __ Maxfeldstr. 5 / 90409 Nuernberg (_ | | (_ |__ mat@mshopf.de Phone +49-911-74053-715 __) |_| __) |__ labs www.mshopf.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org