driver doubt

[Alex Deucher]

On 5/16/07, Conke Hu <conke.hu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/17/07, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/16/07, Felipe Roquette <roquette.felipe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Newbie doubt.
> > >
> > > I am trying to understand how drivers work in X.
> > >
> > > a device driver is a program to interact to/control a hardware.
> > > nvidia, ati etc provide closed graphic drivers.
> > >  are those drivers specific to X?
> > > does those drivers implements all hardware capability?
> > > does these companies provide a manual for their drivers? or this is not
> > > necessary?
> > >
> >
> > First you should understand how the hardware works.  Once you have a
> > grasp on that, you can look into how access to the hardware is
> > implemented.  Few drivers implement the full capability of the
> > hardware for a variety of reasons.  Some vendors provide source code
> > or databooks for their hardware, others do not.  Your best source of
> > <snip>
>
> which vendors provide databook for their hardware?
> Intel publishes the databook of chipset without that of graphics, doesn't it?

here's a list of a few:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DataSheets

Intel has published the books for the 81x chips, and I hear they are
working on getting the newer ones released.

Alex