driver doubt

[Alex Deucher]

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
information is probably the driver source code itself.  First,
however, I'd suggest reading through the following documents:

A look at how modern video cards work:
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/HowVideoCardsWork

Design guide for Xorg/XFree86 video drivers:
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/DESIGN.html

Alex