Great write-up!

Not surprised by the driver software quality issues. When I was still working in consumer electronics / embedded, I saw many examples of the internals of those devices. The software was often a hodgepodge of scripts and drivers, whatever seemed to work, from companies without a great software and details culture.

We would usually rewrite the drivers entirely from the datasheets or from reversing the vendor ones!

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phrotoma 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed, fun to read. Spite driven development. Reminded me of that Asus ACPI issue that somebody went buckwild on last year, or when Tavis Ormandy decided that xterm on windows took too long to launch.

https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

https://cmpxchg8b.com/slowterm.html

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markus_zhang 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for sharing. Do you have any blog or other links about this kind of research and the re-writes? I don’t work in the field so I feel modern chips are way too complex so it is not commercially viable to reverse and rewrite the drivers, but apparently I’m wrong.

	▲	0xdeafbeef 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They often have logic in blobs and run a separate OS inside. See all wifi 7 drivers, all come with blobs and OSS driver simply is a bridge