AUAudiophilip·Oct 12, 2020
In The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux Kernelmesa3d
mesa
HISTORICAL RECORD2017–2023
mesa3d / mesa · Not publicly available
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Observed mentions: 2017-08-26 09:33:15 UTC to 2023-02-03 04:08:05 UTC.
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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
3 sources> 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.