Oct 17, 2020 21:00:00

'AMD Radeon driver' turned out to occupy 10% of the entire Linux kernel

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Linux 5.9 ' released on October 11, 2020, in addition to Intel's 11th generation CPU ' Rocket Lake ' and original GPU architecture ' Xe ', AMD GPU 'Radeon RX 6000' that adopted RDNA 2 , Early support for the latest devices. As a result of examining such Linux 5.9 code, 10.5% of the total was 'driver for AMD Radeon', ' Phoronix ' dealing with Linux related news reports.

The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% Of The Linux Kernel --Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.9-AMDGPU-Stats

Is also the founder and editor of the Phoronix Michael Raraberu Mr. code line count tool ' cloc was examined the number of lines of code in Linux 5.9 in', valid code part is 20,492,875 lines, comment part is 3.58 million There were 8199 lines and 3,729,879 blank lines, and the total number of code lines was 27,819,53 lines. Below is the result of classifying the number of lines of code according to the content such as programming language and structured text.

Compared to the total number of lines of code for Linux 5.9, the number of lines of code for the Radeon driver is 2,163,575, which is about 10.5% of the total number of lines of 20,492,875 for the kernel. Lalabel points out that much of the code is header files, and the cause of the code bloat is the automatically generated header files for GPU registers.

What about other GPU drivers? The

Intel HD Graphics driver has 209,076 lines of code, which is considerably less than the Radeon driver's 2,163,575 lines. About the driver ' nouveau ' for GPU made by NVIDA, it was about 149,000 lines.

In addition, there is an opinion on the social news site Hacker News that the GPU driver can be included in the Linux kernel because it has not undergone a long review process, and it can be considered a necessary evil. 'In any case, Linux 5.9 has a lot of great features,' Laravel said.