Peter Leftwich <Hostmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Second to my goal, I wish to understand how drivers get written for
> hardware,
You might want to read "Peter Norton's Guide to the IBM pc and ps/2"
as an introductory case study. Its well written and well illustrated for
people who don't have a formal background in computer science.
Once you've mastered that, perhaps a book on Microprocessor
Interfacing might help. A good author is Barry P. Brey.
>From there, you might want to get a book on operating systems, to
figure out why software is classified into "application" ,"system",
"device drivers" etc. I read Andrew Tanenbaum, but there are scores of
other choices.
Then its time to dive right into the thick of it. With a reasonable grip on C
programming (try Kerningham and Ritchie), you could very well start
reading linux kernel code.
> and if people accept payment
ahem.
> to reverse engineer drivers.
Can't see what the fun is in reverse engineering drivers for other
platforms. If you mean, writing device drivers for as yet unsupported
hardware on a particular platform, that should be quite possible and
interesting, with decent technical reference manuals for individual
chips. I'm a novice here, but I've just written a working (no
guarantees though) driver for the Pixelview Combo TV Plus. I Started by
reading the labels on top of the chips sitting on the card and doing a
google search for the tech. refs. From there, it just took a
multimeter and some guessing. I'm actually quite pleased with the
results. The video quality is much better than the custom driver that
comes with windows. But if the card is _entirely_ undocumented, it
might take some really smart people to do that, and you might need to dish
out really heavy investments, or give the really smart people who hang
around on the net a really good reason to tackle it. I should think
hard about marketing another card in that case.....
All the Best,
Cherry.
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