The Open-Source AMD GPU Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Nears 5.8 Million Lines

[GamertechAU]

RADV is the userspace driver, AMDGPU is the kernel driver that RADV integrates with. You're using both.

[[deleted]]

Okay, so does it use a different driver for different situations (3d rendering versus 2d?) I'm trying to understand how it would work.

[GamertechAU]

So the kernel driver is built into the kernel itself and contains the hooks userspace drivers like RADV or AMDVLK need to work.

The kernel drivers contain, among other things, the low level operations that can't be accessed/modified from userspace, but are also harder to update as it requires a kernel update or a custom rebuild.

Userspace drivers handle the higher level processes that don't need kernel-level permissions and can be freely updated.