this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Those are the mesa drivers, not the "amd" drivers.
Those very same drivers work on Intel cards and pre-20 series nvidia cards. Mesa is not an AMD project or an Intel project either, that is an independent team.
Even then, those drivers are for allowing the GPU to display to a screen and interact with the system. They are pretty much the same idea as the Microsoft basic display adapter. You still need the xf86 drivers to display X, the opengl drivers for opengl, cuda for cuda, vulkan for vulkan, etc. Those are all separate components because they have libraries included with them.
If all of those extras were built into the kernel, the kernel would be like 2 gigabytes, not 150ish megabytes. It is literally enough to get you going with a getty and that's about it.
The drivers in the kernel (MESA) work with AMD out of the box. If you have AMD hardware, you don't need anything else. What I said was "AMD drivers are currently in the kernel". I did not specify that these drivers are developed by AMD -- you seem to care a lot about that, but it's not part of the argument I was making.
Again, you seem to have misread my first comment, which on the Linux side means: you still need proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux. This is also true for Windows, where many folks are perfectly happy to continually update GeForce Now and stay in that ecosystem. That was the point of the comment.
Not sure why you came at me with such hostility.
I'm not coming at you with hostility, I am informing you that what you are saying is incorrect. If you keep on skimming over everything I say, then perhaps I may get hostile because that is extremely annoying.
If you are so sure of yourself on the kernel driver front, then do me a favor and fire up gentoo or arch and try to run a desktop environment or window manager without the mesa packages installed. You'll find that xorg has mesa as a dependency, and there's a very good reason for that: it's because that's not what the kernel driver is for, mesa itself is larger than the kernel itself. The kernel driver is exactly what I said it is, it allows the operating system to see and interact with the device, it doesn't tell the device how to do its job, it tells it "here are some pipes, you will receive information from certain ones, and send it through others". That's exactly what a kernel driver does, there are no libraries or anything of that nature which is the overwhelming bulk of what makes a graphics driver.
Also, geforce now is optional, you can as always install the drivers without the useless spyware application that nvidia provides.
What is annoying is getting novel after novel of irrelevant information. Can you actually tell me what part of my first comment you are referring to?
The closest I've seen is that you took "AMD drivers" meaning explicitly developed by AMD, but that's not how adjectives work. Now you are all about needing more than MESA, which is also fine and correct, but irrelevant to my comment about nvidia drivers.
https://mesa3d.org/
Go read this and do not reply back until you understand what it is we are talking about.
RADV is not built into the kernel.
Stop trying to sidestep and make it seem like I'm misunderstanding, you know full damn well that when I say AMD drivers that I am referring to drivers for AMD hardware. You have the Foss drivers (mesa), the open source drivers, and the proprietary drivers. All of these are AMD drivers.
Mesa isn't a kernel driver. AMDGPU is the name of the kernel module and it's primarily developed by AMD. Mesa provides OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. implementations and is funded by AMD, Intel and Valve (among others). There's also AMDGPU-PRO which is a proprietary alternative to Mesa from AMD.
You're absolutely right, it isn't one.
That does not change my point in any way, mesa is not built into the kernel, which you need as a dependency to use X, which is required to run a window manager and/or WINE. I never ever said mesa was a kernel driver.