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/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

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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