this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The heavy stuff would be things like shader compilation and state management for multiple different graphics APIs (OpenGL and Vulkan mostly).
AFAIK Linux graphics drivers are usually separated into a userspace and a kernel space component, like
amdgpu
on the kernel side and RADV/RadeonSI within Mesa on the userspace side. So you do not need to do a full reboot to e.g. benefit from performance optimizations within Mesa to get things like faster shader compilation or more efficient draw call submission, which I think most people care about when doing driver updates. In fact you don't even need to soft reboot, because once Mesa is updated, all following uses of it already run the new version, all without a reboot. However if your GPU is not yet supported by the kernel side, then Mesa is of no use to you.That being said, yes the kernel side is a very important part of the driver, but it's such a low-level driver that very few people would be able to do much of anything with it, which is why I made that distinction.