Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DiabloD3 386 days ago
AMD is extremely bad at communications. The driver already contains everything ROCm requires to talk to the GPU, and ROCm itself is only a SDK that contains runtimes, libraries, and compilers.

This part of TinyGrad is not a driver, however it tries to hijack the process to do part of that task. You cannot boot the system with this, and it does not replace any part of the Mesa/DRI/DRM/KMS/etc stack. It does reinitialize the hardware with a different firmware, which might be why you think this is a driver.
1 comments
ryao 386 days ago
I consider it to be a driver, or at least part of one. Userspace drivers exist. Graphic drivers originally were entirely in userspace, until portions of them were moved into the kernel for kernel mode setting and DRM. These days, graphics drivers themselves have both kernel mode and user mode components. The shader compiler for example would be a user mode component.
link
DiabloD3 385 days ago
I'm aware. One of the biggest things in fixing the Linux desktop was no longer needing drivers in the Xserver and needing it to be suid root.

What was linked is written in Python. Nothing in Python is ever going to be a userland driver.

link
ryao 380 days ago
There is no reason people cannot write userland drivers in Python.
link