On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 11:07 AM Tomek LECOCQ <tomek.lecocq@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello,
I’ve already asked this on the Kernel Newbies mail list, but as developing nouveau seems to be kind of similar to what I want to achieve, I thought it would be a good idea to ask it here as well.
I have a PCI-Express video capture card that has a proprietary driver for Linux.
I have some experience with programming in C, and so I would like to start a hobby project to develop a free/libre driver for this device for Linux.
Of course I don’t have access to any documentation about how to communicate with this device (I’ve tried to contact the company making these, but my hopes are not high), so I think I will need to reverse-engineer the way the existing driver communicates with the hardware. How could I achieve this ?
Usually drivers map PCIe bars into the VM and read/write at certain offsets to do.. stuff. In the linux kernel we have the mmiotrace tracer in order to capture what a driver does with the hardware. You still need to interpret the trace file, but at least this should give you the raw data on what's going on. Hope that helps.
Also, the long term goal of this project would be to have this driver merged into mainline, so what is allowed or not while doing this to avoid problematic legal ramifications ?
Thank you for your help.
Best regards.
Tomek Lecocq
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