Programming, graphics, games, media, C++, Windows, Internet and more...
Entries for tag "driver", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 2.
# Driver source code is not what you may think
Thu
28
Dec 2017
AMD just released Open Source Driver for Vulkan, with source code available on GitHub under MIT license. That’s a good opportunity to explain how drivers source look like. When I was developing graphics driver (I no longer do - I now have quite different position), people kept asking me "How is it like to code in C?" or "How is it like to code in kernel space?", unaware that none of it was true in my case.
Many developers think that coding a driver is some hardcore, low-level stuff. Maybe it is true for some small drivers in embedded systems world. What they may not know is that a modern PC graphics driver (and I bet other kinds of drivers as well) is a very complex beast, with only a small portion of it working in kernel mode and only a small portion (if any) written in plain old C or assembly. Majority of the code is just normal C++ with classes, virtual functions and everything. It is compiled into normal user-mode DLL libraries that get loaded into address space of a game. Sure the code may be a little bit different than standard desktop apps. It may be optimized for performance, as well as memory usage. It may not use exceptions, Boost or STL. It may have to handle out-of-memory errors gracefully. But it’s still a modern, object-oriented code that uses (relatively) new language features like constexpr or enum class.
Comments | #driver #graphics Share
# Developing Graphics Driver
Thu
12
Jul 2012
Want to know what do I do at Intel? Obviously all details are secret, but generally, as a Graphics Software Engineer, I code graphics driver for our GPU. What does this software do? When you write a game these days, you usually use some game engine, but I'm sure you know that on a lower level, everything ends up as a bunch of textured 3D triangles rendered with hardware acceleration by the GPU. To render them, the engine uses one of standard graphics APIs. On Windows it can be DirectX or OpenGL, on Linux and Mac it is OpenGL, on mobile platforms it is OpenGL ES. On the other side, there are many hardware manufacturers - like NVIDIA, AMD, Intel or Imagination Technologies - that make discrete or embedded GPUs. These chips have different capabilities and instruction sets. So graphics driver is needed to translate calls to API (like IDirect3DDevice9::DrawIndexedPrimitive) and shader code to form specific to the hardware.
Want to know more? Intel recently published documentation of the GPU from the new Ivy Bridge processor - see this news. You can find this documentation on intellinuxgraphics.org website. It consists of more than 2000 pages in 17 PDF files. For example, in the last volume (Volume 4 Part 3) you can see how instructions of our programmable execution units look like. They are quite powerful :)