Almeida: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

Daniel Almeida continueshis look at graphics drivers on the Collabora blog.

The starting point is to understand that a kernel-mode GPU driverconnects a much larger UMD (user-mode driver) to the actualGPU. The UMD will actually implement APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL,OpenCL, and others. These APIs, in turn, will be used by actualprograms to describe their workload to the GPU. This includesallocating and using not only the geometry and textures, but alsothe shaders being used to process said data into the finalresult. This means that a key aspect of GPU drivers is actuallyallocating GPU memory to house data related to the current scenebeing drawn so that it can actually be operated on by the hardware.