Raspberry Pi's Nonchalant Graphics Stack For Linux

The nVidia proprietary driver didn't need to be reverse-engineered. The developers of Nouveau simply wrote tools to capture the driver's requests to the different cards. Hopefully the same can be done for the various SoC's.

@gus3: Um, that pretty much IS reverse-engineering, or at least one method which can be labeled that. It's not quite the same as looking at code in a disassembler, but it's also totally different from simply writing code to a spec, because you're having to reverse-engineer the spec by seeing how the original program works in practice using a tracing tool.

It's the same method used to create the reverse-engineering Broadcom drivers IIRC; one team using tracing methods to see how the hardware worked and how the official driver talked to it, and then wrote a spec. A second team took this spec and wrote a driver with it.

Then would you call the Wine project "reverse-engineered"? Because the Wine devs prefer to call it a "re-implementation" of the Windows API.

Wine is both. Re-implementation of the API, reverse-engineering of undocumented API functions and bug workarounds for Windows apps.

Exactly. The publicly-published API doesn't need reverse engineering, you just write new code to do the same things as all the functions in the API. The API is a specification. But when there's undocumented API calls, that has to be reverse engineered.