AMD Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Closing In On 4 Million Lines

[bridgman]

Why? I thought, that graphics drivers are big, but why intel driver is so much smaller than AMD one?

IIRC a big part of the difference is header files, which are only used in compilation and do not contribute to the compiled driver size. Michael's numbers show a bit under 3 million lines of headers and a bit under a half million lines of code.

I only have older kernel code handy on this computer but looking at that code the AMD code size is a bit over 2x the size of Intel's code, which makes sense given the much wider range of hardware we support.

Our header files are much larger, however - the main differences are:

1. We don't compress the header files for different hardware products into a single file to eliminate registers that might not have changed between generations

2. We have a lot more significantly different hardware generations supported by the same driver

3. We include nearly all registers in the header files, not just the ones currently used by the driver

Again, header file size only contributes to source code size on a developer's system, not to the size of the built driver.

[libv]

If only AMD had kept internal control over ATI, and if only companies like Red hat had not worked hard to torpedo an actual C code driver with actual open documentation, then register level documentation would have continued to exist past february 2009, and that info would not have to be carried around inside the kernel.

[Developer12]

What a completely meaningless do-nothing article.

That isn't 4 million lines of code, yet the article waits until the end to say so. It's 4 million lines of autogenerated headers which have no functional purpose, never make it into the final kernel, and shouldn't count for shit. If you ignore all those header files I expect that the AMD and intel drivers wouldn't look very different at all. This is nothing but Michael idly stating at the output of lc because he apparently has nothing better to write about.

[boboviz]

Those 3.38 million lines are from 2.91 lines of actual detected code, 339k lines of code comments, and 1.3 million blank lines between the code

Solved: remove the blank lines!!

[smitty3268]

What a completely meaningless do-nothing article.

That isn't 4 million lines of code, yet the article waits until the end to say so. It's 4 million lines of autogenerated headers which have no functional purpose, never make it into the final kernel, and shouldn't count for shit. If you ignore all those header files I expect that the AMD and intel drivers wouldn't look very different at all. This is nothing but Michael idly stating at the output of lc because he apparently has nothing better to write about.

Michael runs these copy and paste clickbait articles every now and then. I'm guessing ad revenue must have been a bit short this month, and this is the result.

There are certainly worse alternatives.