[Open-graphics] From PCI to VGA registers

["Ing. Daniel Rozsnyó"]

Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
> On 8/31/07, Fredrik Tolf <fredrik at dolda2000.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 08:40 -0400, Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
>>> Time to disassemble someone's BIOS code and find out?  :)
>> Just for the sake of trying, I attempted to extract the BIOS of one of
>> my nVidia cards, but I failed. `lspci -v' says the following:
> 
> I see that Tom Sylla answered your main question.
> 
> I probably shouldn't have suggested reverse engineering someone's
> BIOS.  I don't know the laws about that, and information acquired this
> way must be handled very carefully.  WE have to be especially careful,
> because the OGP could be damaged by even false legal claims of us
> stealing someone's intellectual property.

If you do that in Slovakia (central europe) then such an action is 
totally legal and it is one of the exceptions given by law - "reverse 
engineer someone's code to ensure compatibility". To follow that law, we 
could reverse engineer only a PC BIOS, or let the linux-bios people 
reverse engineer a VGA BIOS (the next paragraph in the law forbids RE 
for competitive purposes - e.g. OGP looking at NV vga bios, etc).

Anyway, anybody asked linux-bios if they know the answer we're seeking?