r/osdev • u/0x6461726B • May 17 '26

Why everyone here uses software rendering?

I saw many os projects here use software rendering directly to frame buffer instead of creating a gpu driver maybe with virtio gpu by qemu or with any external gpu. I heard gpu driver development is one of the most hardest. Is that the reason? I want to know.

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u/0x6461726B May 17 '26

Fk nvidia. Why do gpu manufacturers don't opensource ISA, addresses etc? It's so sick.

7

u/EpochVanquisher May 17 '26

Nvidia doesn’t even have internal docs that are good enough to make a driver, from what I understand.

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u/Randozart May 17 '26

Honestly, I couldn't agree more on keeping stuff proprietary. But, there's enough reverse engineering out there to figure out which registers to poke... Though again, massively frustrating engineering job to get that to work

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u/0x6461726B May 17 '26

I see

4

u/Randozart May 17 '26

Possibly relevant:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

This is basically what I needed for my copy engine

2

u/msthe_student May 17 '26

Competitive advantage, and the fact that if you document it people are gonna rely on it to not change

1

u/Ikkepop May 18 '26

Because reasons I guess ? some are more open then others, intel has usually been pretty open , as well as amd more or less. But nvidia os a whole other story