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I suppose you would then statically link all gpu drivers into your graphical application? And whenever a new gpu or a new driver is released, you will recompile
by mahkoh 5y ago
I suppose you would then statically link all gpu drivers into your graphical application? And whenever a new gpu or a new driver is released, you will recompile your application. In case a new driver drops support for older cards, you would then include multiple versions of the driver in your binary. Naturally your binary will be several hundred megabytes large. An interesting idea. I was not aware that proprietary drivers even allowed this.
- sprash 5y agoGraphics drivers is one of the rare if not the only pain point with static linking. The reason is that drivers in general should be part of the kernel but GPU drivers are running in userspace. Proprietary blobs, fast evolving hardware and as a result fast changing APIs are to blame. But on the other hand high level GPU APIs are pretty stable and in general backwards compatible. A program from the year 2000 that only links against OpenGL would still run today (with x86 libs obviously). This means to static link as much as possible still has value.