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0 pointsmadushan10002y ago0 comments

What do you mean? most complicated parts of the gpu driver are in userland and handled by Mesa or equivalent. Kernel drivers expose a standard interface(DRM) which userspace drivers use to upload compiled gpu programs and manage gpu memory. Also, linux is not tied to gcc extensions, it can be compiled with llvm(clang) for a long time now.

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sylware2y ago· 2 in thread

What you said is mostly wrong.

The kernel part of the GPU driver is massive. It is well known, maybe you were misguided: for instance the AMD GPU drivers are gigantic compared to the actual kernel.

clang(llvm) is playing cat and mouse with gcc extensions and recent ISO C tantrums which creeps into the kernel:Linus T. does not resist those, he does resist only the linux useland ABI(syscalls) breakers.

madushan1000OP2y ago

It's also well known the driver is massive because there are hundreds of thousands of lines of auto-generated register access code in there. Not because it's inherently very complex.

sylware2y ago

And again you are wrong. It was debunked not a long time ago, and I think it was here on HN. The AMD drivers, kernel side, are still gigantic even excluding the generated register descriptions. Is this what we call a AI lie?

But where you may be right: it seems nvidia hardware programming interface is much cleaner than AMD one and may require much much less code.

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