• Almeida: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

    From LWN.net@1337:1/100 to All on Wed Aug 6 17:30:08 2025
    Almeida: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

    Date:
    Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:16:34 +0000

    Description:
    Daniel Almeida continues
    his look at graphics drivers on the Collabora blog. The starting point is to understand that a kernel-mode GPU driver
    connects a much larger UMD (user-mode driver) to the actual
    GPU. The UMD will actually implement APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL,
    OpenCL, and others. These APIs, in turn, will be used by actual
    programs to describe their workload to the GPU. This includes
    allocating and using not only the geometry and textures, but also
    the shaders being used to process said data into the final
    result. This means that a key aspect of GPU drivers is actually
    allocating GPU memory to house data related to the current scene
    being drawn so that it can actually be operated on by the hardware.

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    Link to news story:
    https://lwn.net/Articles/1032744/


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