Does anyone on Jow Forums know anything about the legality of reverse engineering a driver?

Does anyone on Jow Forums know anything about the legality of reverse engineering a driver?
Recently I used qemu to capture the communications of my Sound Blaster Z and was able to make it work on Linux. I had to take firmware out of the Windows driver file though, and I wonder if that's illegal.
Anyone done anything similar?

Attached: sbz.jpg (1280x1024, 164K)

Other urls found in this thread:

docs.salixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_b43_firmware_for_Broadcom_Wireless_cards
drive.google.com/drive/folders/1r-X8g6It5AO7SwgJc1JQfJ8KCOyqrr_d
myredditnudes.com/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I think you're lost

Attached: 1508298132046.png (411x387, 6K)

If you're not selling it commercially its fine.

People here have 10+ terabytes of pirated material and you’re asking if copy pasting firmware from Windows to Linux is illegal. Do you know where you are?

I'm not concerned about it ethically, I'm concerned about getting it included in the Linux kernel. I'm already using it on my own.

Did it not work under Linux out of box?

No. It defaulted to a driver meant for the Google Chromebook, and only got audio out of the front headphone port. I modified the driver to make it work for the Sound Blaster Z, but it required me using a different firmware than the Chromebook used.

Maybe I should have been a bit more clear. I'm not concerned about the legality of it for myself, I'm concerned about if it'll get accepted into the kernel or if I'll legally be able to redistribute it. It'll suck if I have to tell people how to extract the firmware from the Windows driver and force them to compile their own kernel to make it work.

If you take the code that is in the driver and distribute it yourself, then that's normally against the copyright of the developer, unless they released it under a permissive license and you follow the rules of that license.

Youll see most foss drivers/software that rely on blobs will instead have tools which unpacks/extracts what they need from the propietary driver and use it. its a grey area but nobody really has the effort or hate of linux to attack someone who just wants their product to work on things they didnt specifically write a driver for.

Do you know of any examples of Linux drivers that do this? Are there any included in the kernel that are like this?

Depends on the license of the software. You could read the terms and conditions, do research on the license or contact Creative Labs.

Essentially its what NDISWrapper was made for. It ran wireless cards using the windows drivers.
Also Broadcom drivers before the update in kernel 4.something which fixed a lot of wifi issues.
Quite a few TV Capture cards. i remember manually extracting a blob for one ages ago.

>Creative labs won't give a fuck.
>Linux people may be upset that you used a part of a "muh propietary software".
>Users will be thankful to you for making a working driver.
Ikd, do what you think is best, maybe contact them or see the TaC as some stated.

>It'll suck if I have to tell people how to extract the firmware from the Windows driver and force them to compile their own kernel to make it work.
I wouldn't mind reading about how to do that tbqh. I don't have an immediate use for that right away, but it sounds interesting.

You probably can't distribute the firmware, but it depends. You probably can get your code into the kernel even if you can't. It would be up to SoundBlaster to decide if you can distribute the firmware or not.

Take a look at Broadcom wireless and the kernel driver b43 for an example of how this works out in some cases,
docs.salixos.org/wiki/How_to_install_b43_firmware_for_Broadcom_Wireless_cards

Basically... you should publish your code/changes but not the firmware itself unless you get permission to do so (you could just ask them). Publish instructions on how to extract the firmware from their drivers instead of the actual binary blob and people who have this card will do that themselves.

I just looked at the firmware currently in Linux, and then found a string pattern, which happened to be MXFL, and then grep'd through the Windows driver to see if it showed up. It did, and the firmware is pretty similar, except for there's a few sections that my card doesn't seem to use. I suspect they're for the higher end ZxR. Not extremely interesting.

Thanks for the info. I'm reading into it all.
That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Huh. Hopefully it can be included, I just sent an e-mail to Creative. Seems like a lot of normies would just give up if they had to do that kind of stuff, but I guess normies aren't exactly the average GNU/Linux user.

I have literally been waiting years for someone to fix this. It blows my mind that this card still doesn't work under linux.

I'm not sure if it works on the other Sound Blaster Z variations yet, but if you're interested in compiling your own kernel and testing it out, I have the patch and firmware uploaded here:
drive.google.com/drive/folders/1r-X8g6It5AO7SwgJc1JQfJ8KCOyqrr_d

the soundblaster police will rappel down through your roof and kill your dog if you do

>I'm concerned about getting it included in the Linux kernel
Contact a lawyer, it's probably illegal.

It’s only illegal if you copy code directly. As long as you’re creating your own implementation you’re fine. If you don’t plan on sharing then there’s nothing to worry about.

go email linus.
[email protected]