WAwahern·Feb 3, 2023
For the curious (I was), I believe this is the associated commit: https://github.com/Mesa3D/mesa/commit/f2e535e4fed5bdc13e11a4...
In Exploring Rust for Vulkan drivers, part 1mesa3d
mesa
HISTORICAL RECORD2017–2023
mesa3d / mesa · Not publicly available
mesa
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sources> Closed source GPU drivers are not ordinary drivers. They have a lot of quirks and workarounds for programs, especially games.
The quirks part is a bit of a meme. Mesa contains a few application-specific overrides here and there: https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/c62996796cc46f1a1406f365..., https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/a678ec9b8c057311ed7e9697.... The reason Linux drivers, including the one from Nvidia, have fewer quirks is simply that Linux has fewer 3d applications overall. Those quirks also reside in userspace driver parts and should not affect system stability.
> When you try to port these drivers as-is to another platforms, things get awry.
Again, quirks are a property of a relatively high-level userspace part of the driver. There is nothing hazardous about porting them.
In AMD vs. Intel vs. Nvidia: How Users Are Switching$1.4 billion. Wow. That's a lot of dough.
I feel like 202x might be another decade where no new chip making companies emerge. I had great hopes for Nuvia becoming one of them. My first most primitive reaction is that this is like another PA Semi[1]: great talent & new prospects, fresh air, vanishing into one of the super-massive existing players.
Qualcomm does some open source work, but most of the support comes from outside engineers reverse engineering their products or otherwise doing the work[2]. The Freedreno graphics driver for example allows their gpu to be used (OpenGL, Vulkan drivers), & has been a huge effort. That work mostly comes from Google engineers like Rob Clark (who started Freedreno iirc), Eric Anholt, Igalia engineers like Danil, & countless others[3].
In the wifi-router world, where Qualcomm also has a huge presence,
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we rely on hunting around for open-source code drops of what usually seems like pretty old but better than we've got code, such as this recent find[4], which is hopefully going to help us catch a couple years up in support level to what Qualcomm is doing today.
Nuvia explicitly stated they wanted to chase hyperscaler market. And I think a lot of this was positioning. That hyper-scalers wanted good tech, would use good tech. Where-as a lot of the world, they want what they have but better, a lot of legacy concerns, hand holding. Nuvia wanted to build a new platform, a good, well supported platform, with next-gen technologies. We were all expecting open-source perhaps Rust-based firmwares & management systems, pursuant to latest OpenCompute Project specs &c. They were clear about targetting hyper-scalers, & big chips, but somehow the hope always was that they'd help reform & reshape computing & what was available to everyone. They certainly talked the good game, sounded real good on Twitter. Ah well.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2012/09/18/more-details-shake-loose-...
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Qualcomm
[3] https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/commits/master/src/freedreno
[4] https://forum.openwrt.org/t/adding-openwrt-support-for-xiaom...
While I do not believe Broadcom has released any documentation on the 3D hardware in the Raspberry Pi 4, you can figure out a fair amount by looking at the Mesa driver. In particular see the shader processor instruction packing code (https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/master/src/broadcom/qpu/...).
For vertex arrays, while in theory the driver could load vec2/vec4 F16 attributes into the vertex shader as-is, AFAICT the Mesa driver does not attempt to do this; they get converted to F32 as they are loaded from main memory. There would be downsides to getting rid of this conversion... in particular the hardware does not support F32->F16 conversions when loading attributes, so the driver would have to recompile the shader if you switched the vertex arrays to F32 (or perhaps more likely recompile the shader when it realises you are using F16 v
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ertex arrays rather than F32).
In any case, the hardware does support zero overhead F16->F32 conversions when loading attributes, so you should not see a performance drop when switching vertex arrays to F16! The performance should go up slightly as less data needs to be loaded from main memory. If you're seeing an 80% performance drop something has gone terribly wrong!
> That said, I haven't seen many app-specific hacks in the open source drivers, even in the user-space code.
They are enabled via driconf [0]. Not nearly as many as what I imagine you'd find in the proprietary Windows drivers though.
[0] https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/master/src/util/00-mesa-...
In The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux KernelLeaving aside arguments about "what the drivers are", the kernel driver being discussed here generally doesn't have or need that kind of thing. The user-space drivers which talk to the kernel drivers are under the Mesa umbrella as part of Gallium for OpenGL and Direct3D support (e.g. https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/tree/master/src/gallium/drive...) or as a standalone driver for Vulkan support (https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/tree/master/src/amd/vulkan). That said, I haven't seen many app-specific hacks in the open source drivers, even in the user-space code.
If anyone wants to learn more about lower-level aspects of GPUs, the Vulkan driver code I linked is one of the best places to start. It directly implements the Vulkan API on one end and talks to the kernel drivers on the other end, so it's relatively easy to follow if you're a systems p
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rogrammer with an API-level understanding of graphics. Just pick a Vulkan function of your choice and start tracing through the code, e.g. vkCmdDraw: https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/master/src/amd/vulkan/ra.... The Vulkan driver calls into some of the low-level radeonsi code I linked from the Gallium tree but it isn't a Gallium-based driver, so you don't have to deal with those extra layers of abstraction.
Of course glDrawElements() has to go into the driver, because it needs to do hardware-specific work. This is obviously true in OpenGL(ES), but even if you were to implement it via a translation layer to Vulkan, you still have to call the various Vulkan-equivalent commands, at the very least vkCmdDrawIndexed. Here's an implementation to make it painfully obvious why that has to involve the driver: https://github.com/mesa3d/mesa/blob/d819b1fcec02be5e0cfc87b6...
In Beginners Guide to Vulkan