Introduction

This page is a quick presentation about using MmioTrace to reverse engineer nvidia proprietary driver. Normal users only need to do this when a developer asked for it, either because the card is new or for debugging a specific problem (output detection problem, gpu lockup, etc).

The full instructions are already very well presented and explained in Documentation/trace/mmiotrace.txt, so you must read that file.

Requirements

• a recent kernel (2.6.29 or newer) with CONFIG_MMIOTRACE enabled. For older kernel, see MmioTrace.
• nvidia proprietary driver installed. To know which version you need, see BlobVersions.

Overview

• Start tracing
• Load nvidia.ko and start X up with the nvidia proprietary driver
• Run some 3d for a few seconds (e.g. fire up glxgears)
• Stop tracing and send the generated output to mmio.dumps at gmail.com