Almeida: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

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.