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by madushan1000 897 days ago
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.
1 comments
sylware 897 days ago
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.

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madushan1000 897 days 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.
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sylware 897 days 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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